L. Frank is the nom d'arte of L. Frank Manriquez, a Tongva-Acjachemen artist, writer, tribal scholar, cartoonist, and indigenous language activist. She lives and works in California.

Art

In 1990, L. Frank was Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California; her artwork has been exhibited widely throughout California and appears in several publications.

Publications

Her regular column/graphic, "Acorn Soup," has appeared in the quarterly newsletter News from Native California since 1992. "Acorn Soup" features the comic adventures of Coyote in his various guises: the Creator of the Universe and the Buffoon, the Trickster and the Tricked, always the Indian's Wise Fool. A selection of L. Frank's "Acorn Soup" cartoons have been collected and published in book form. Concerning L. Frank, one reviewer of the book at Amazon.com commented: "Introducing the Gary Larson of the Native American cartoon world!"

Another book, "First Families: Photographic History of California Indians" with co-author Kim Hogeland, is due to be published in September 2006. It is an introduction to California’s native populations, with pictures such as the re-creation and sailing of the tii’at (a traditional Tongva/Gabrieleño canoe) off Catalina Island

Santa Catalina Island, California

Santa Catalina Island, often called Catalina Island, or just Catalina, is a rocky island off the coast of the U.S. state of California. The island is long and across at its greatest width. The island is located about south-southwest of Los Angeles, California. The highest point on the island is...

 in 1995, to the 1918 picture of Kumeyaay men performing a sacred funerary dance with karuk (vision) dolls, to an image from 1932 of Salinans leading anthropologist J. P. Harrington on an expedition along California’s central coast. Each chapter covers a different region of California, with brief essays introducing the region’s cultures, histories, and contemporary life.

Community Activism

She is a Board Member of the California Indian Basketweavers Association and one of seven founding board members of the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages, organizations that are involved in the preservation and revival of Native Californian languages through traditional arts practice, language immersion, conferences and workshops.

She has won several awards for her activities, including from the American Association of University Women, the James Irvine Foundation

James Irvine Foundation

The James Irvine Foundation is a philanthropic nonprofit organization established to benefit the people of California. It seeks to promote social equity and enrich the cultural and civic life of America’s most populous state through its grants in three areas: the arts, youth and education, and...

, the Fund for Folk Culture (for travel to the Native Californian art collection at the Musée de l' Homme in Paris). In 1995 she was featured as a "Local Hero" in KQED-TV/Examiner Newspaper's Native American Heritage Month series.

She is also very involved in the Two-Spirit

Two-Spirit

Two-Spirit People , is an English term that emerged in 1990 out of the third annual inter-tribal Native American/First Nations gay/lesbian American conference in Winnipeg. It describes Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native...

culture.

External links

• The Art of L. Frank
• L. Frank bio and video, Mingei International Museum