‘Pipe Brothers: Tom and James Franco’
Vanity Fair called him the “third Franco brother,” but artist Tom Franco takes issue with that.
“I’m the second brother!” he says. “David’s younger than me, James is older than me.”
Tom is a sculptor, and big brother James, in addition to being a world-famous movie actor, is a painter. They are also frequent collaborators, and their work is currently on display at the ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center in a show called “Pipe Brothers.”
They started with an unusual medium — ceramic sewer pipes manufactured in Phoenix — and transformed them into colorful sculptural columns.
Tom will be in town Sept. 8 for an artist reception, and he spoke with us from his home in the Bay Area to talk about the exhibit and about growing up Franco. Question: Why sewer pipes?
Answer: I got invited over to the Mission Clay Arts and Industry program over in Phoenix. One of my art mentors for a long time, John Toki, is a longtime friend of the owner of Mission Clay, Bryan Vansell. They’ve been doing this for like 30 years, and it’s just a very casual program . ... It’s pipes that usually go underground and are used for water flow or sewage flow, so it ebbs and flows with demand for those needs around the country. Whatever else people can think up to use these pipes for, they’re open to, but the art is a great fit, and I’m working with them more now to figure out how we can expand the program. The city of Berkeley is talking to my group, the Firehouse Art Collective, and they gave us 95 public sculpture sites to play with to figure out if we can do that. Q: So how did you get your brother involved?
A: John Toki came to a show. I’ve done a few shows with James. He’s mostly a painter. He does large-scale paintings. He’s been doing that since before he started acting. And I’m a painter but mostly a sculptor. I do mixed-media found-object assemblages. And we did a show at one of my spaces in Berkeley, and John saw it and What: Artist reception with Tom Franco. When: 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 8. Exhibit continues through Sept. 23. Where: ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center, the Brickyard, 699 S. Mill Ave., No. 108, Tempe. Admission: Free. Details: 480-727-8170, asuartmuseum.asu.edu loved it and thought it would be a good fit. Q: How were you inspired by form of the pipes?
A: As a sculptor of found objects, I get obsessed with shapes that have some kind of a history. You know, we use objects all the time in a certain way, and then when you take them out of context, it’s very interesting to me to be like, “Well, what does this shape mean to us?” And the cylindrical form, it’s a big one. After going to the factory for the first time, I just keep seeing it over and over again and using it in different ways. It’s something that we use every day, but it’s super hard to make. Q: What other kinds of objects do you work with?
A: I often take forms, and I don’t have to know why I like them right away, I can just say, “Hey, this is something I can get behind, let’s play with it.” And sometimes those obsessions go on for a long time. Before the pipe, I was obsessing on shoes . ... Very common object, very unusual object — again, I could never make that, but I love to paint on them and create narratives on them, make them into little faces. Q: Are you and James similar as artists?
A: We work a lot with narrative, so I use a lot of people or animals, and I’m usually telling a story of society, people coming together, how do we live together, how do we have a good time together. I’m very interested in that because that’s part of what I do. I manage artists and I manage spaces, living spaces, studio spaces, event spaces, so it’s a lot of community building. James does it in a similar way. He obsesses on youth, and he goes back to his high-school years a lot and tells stories about that. Q: So what’s it like being “the third Franco brother”?
A: It’s exciting. As James’s thing picked up when we were younger, it was a big adjustment because he broke the mold for our family and kind of got into the fame business, but we all adjusted very well. We all stayed really close. For example, this is our second year doing a high-school workshop film. So Betsy (Franco-Feeney, their mother) was the writer, I was one of the main producers, James was the producerslash-director. We work with Palo Alto High School, and this year we expanded it to any high schools in the Bay Area and beyond. It’s an extracurricular thing, we meet about once a month and had about 40 high school kids, and in the end we did auditions and shot a feature film, and this year it’s sponsored by the Elysium Bandini Studios, which I work with in LA, and the goal is to be ongoing every year. Q: What was it like growing up in your arty family?
A: My parents were painters at Stanford, and they both transitioned out of that shortly after school. When my brother was born, my mother didn’t want oil paints around the house, so she switched to writing, and she hasn’t stopped. And my father went into business . ... As we were growing up, they really didn’t put pressure on us or force us into arts at all. They kind of were hands-off. And we all gravitated to it in our own way. It was in the air, the way they thought about things and the way they approached life.