BEATIE: Speaking of looking through a little hole, your first medium as a kid was photography? L FRANK: Yes. When I was about 8, my stepfather started letting me use his old Leica RangeFinder and I fell in love because that became my voice. I didn't speak much so the photographs became my way of speaking. And then the following year for Christmas they gave me a pink Brownie Hawkeye and I cried because me and pink are not friends and it wasn't a Leica. And then I shut up because I realized that it was my eye and it is still you that knows when to push that button. BEATIE: When did you first go by L and tell us the story behind that? L FRANK: Well, the L came from talking with my grandfather. He talked about how there were bad doctors and good doctors and how you shouldn't let people have your first name because that's a big part of the power people use. So I started going by L and people never guess what it stands for because it's a more unusual name. And then the Frank part came because I was living in Ventura with my first partner and a lot of other outcasts who were all Two-Spirit or queer or whatever the terminology is now. And my partner would say: “Look at your little Franks.” And so then it became L Frank. I often get invited to art shows where only men are invited. If you wanna get anywhere in life these days, you gotta be a dude. BEATIE: Hey it’s one of the first things I said to my mum, I asked her if she could turn me into a boy and she said, “No darling, I’m so sorry.” And then I said, “Well then can you turn me into a frog?” I was like 2 or 3 years old and that was my first request. I knew that it would be easier either being a boy or a frog. So I like L Frank. And that's also what the Two-Spirit ethos is about right, how we possess both? L FRANK: Exactly, everybody does, otherwise you're not a complete person. The Lakota have four circles and different colours: red, black, yellow, white and those divisions add up to man, woman, child, elder, so that's the complete person. BEATIE: I like that. That's beautiful. When did you first get a sense of what you were here to do and was it through those conversations at the burial site? L FRANK: Yes and before when I decided where I was going to be because the mandate from creator for most indigenous peoples is to care for the place where you live. And so I did a lot of art but it wasn't until I was an artist in residence at the Headlands in San Francisco and I was going to make the first stone bowl in a couple hundred years and each morning I would stop at this cove, at dawn, and I started seeing everybody who lived there: the deer and the foxes and the frogs and the boys. And I realized that as they all got up and did stuff — and this is all obvious but I'm a very slow learner — I realized that everybody knew their place and that my place was to make art. So I must get up and do it. That's when everything changed for me. BEATIE: And did you feel like finding your art, or your art finding you, could be an antidote and a tool to really challenge the invisibility that you were seeing? L FRANK: Oh I say that right out. Art is a way for people to see us as not extinct. Because it's very harmful for a kid to hear that they're extinct. And it's very harmful for them to go through life with nothing that represents them in their own homelands. That's the primary reason why I've had shows. It's not like I did anything to get them. People would say, “You need to have a show,” and I just wanted my tribe to see their name in print because that's how people become real in this world. And our vocabulary, the Tongva vocabulary, is minuscule so it's not easy to learn this language. I created a language program which is now going across the planet so that we can learn our languages because we’re tired BASKETRY A SMALL STONE CUP - STEATITE (2021) THE SISTERS
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