Gay Fraker Held (b.1955, Chicago, Illinois) has enjoyed a distinguished artistic career spanning more than five decades of creative dedication. Originally trained as a printmaker, with formal degrees in both printmaking and drawing, their early work throughout the 1980s and into the late 1989s was dominated by works on paper and represented by a gallery in Chicago.

By the 1990s, they returned to painting and began exhibiting in Massachusetts, where they were spending half the year. Now based full-time in Chicago once again, Held’s work reflects a deep engagement with the present moment.

Rather than aiming to replicate reality, the artist prioritizes an authentic response to contemporary experience. The gesture of the mark, the unique style, the hand, and the eye—these have become central to their practice, with the external world taking on a secondary role.