Spark Artist

Painting & sculpture

Derek Franklin is an artist and the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery, Reed College. Franklin received an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Selected solo presentations of his work include Meditation Furniture for Ten Minute Breaks (Document Gallery, Chicago, IL); grief is on my calendar everyday at 2pm, The Poet’s Lips, and Between The Time of the Dog and the Wolf (Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR); The Shadows That Haunt the Rooms Behind Our Eyes (Freight and Volume, New York, NY); and Mending Capers (Thierry Goldberg, New York, NY). Franklin’s recent work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Simone Subal, Rawson Projects, Y gallery, Performa Biennial, Melanie Flood Projects and The Center for Creative Research. His work has been written about in Art Forum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Bomb Magazine. Franklin is a 2025 Hallie Ford Fellow in Visual Arts and the Director of the artist-run space SE Cooper Contemporary.