Louis Fratino and James Hannaham In Conversation

Pratt Fine Arts and the Writing Department are delighted to welcome Louis Fratino to our MFA studios at Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a conversation with James Hannaham.

Brooklyn-based artist, Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, MD), adapts the visual languages of European and American Modernism to contemplate the beauty and queerness in the gestures and experiences of the everyday—in nature, in the home, and in one’s own self-conception.

Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2015). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014.

A selection of Fratino’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sketchbooks are currently featured in conversation with works by Matisse from the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art in the exhibition Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, on view at the museum through September 6, 2026. In 2024, Fratino’s paintings were featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. That same year, his first institutional solo exhibition, Louis Fratino. Satura, was held at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph published by Mousse Publishing.

Fratino’s work is included in major institutional collections, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Christien Sveaas Art Foundation, Oslo, Norway; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

(Photo: Alessandro Teoldi)

is a writer, a visual artist, or both. His novel Delicious Foods won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has shown text-based work at The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Open Source Gallery, and won Best in Show at Main Street Arts’ 2020 exhibit Biblio Spectaculum. In 2021 he released Pilot Impostor, a multigenre book inspired by an anthology of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. His third novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, won the Ferro-Grumley Award from the Publishing Triangle, a second Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2022, an LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and another New York Times Notable Book. He co-founded the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them until 2002. His arts criticism once appeared regularly in the Village Voice, and still does occasionally in 4Columns. He holds a BA in Art from Yale and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. He recently won a Guggenheim fellowship.

(Photo: courtesy of James Hannaham)

Access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Dock 72 is restricted ONLY to those with an ID card of a visitor pass. All who RSVP here will receive an email with information on how to receive their Visitor QR Code Pass, which will be issued the morning of the event.

Please register each person attending the event with their individual email, so that they receive their own unique QR pass. Limit one pass per visitor.

You will receive a digital QR pass via email that will appear in your inbox as: DOCK 72 Visitor Check-in Tuesday, February 17 from [email protected] one hour ahead of the event. Please check your SPAM folder if you cannot locate it. NO PASS = NO ACCESS. This pass will be good for the date of the event only.

You will first use your pass to enter the Brooklyn Navy Yard at whichever gate is convenient. You can come by taxi (showing your pass to the guard to enter) but if you drive, you will need to park OUTSIDE the Navy Yard and walk in. There is NO parking at Dock 72.

Additionally, Dock 72 is situated next to the NYC Ferry and Citibike, and there are shuttles available on-site to and from MTA subway stops. For more info, please visit:

NOTE: If you are taking a taxi or rideshare to the Navy Yard, enter, as your drop-off and pick-up location. Enter the Navy Yard via Building 77, using your access QR code at the gates at the end of the hall in Building 77, past the food places. Rideshares and taxis are not allowed to enter the Navy Yard for pick-up.

When you arrive at Dock 72, enter the Lobby and then use your pass at ELEVATOR BANK C, which is the last elevator bank right at the end of the lobby (past the lobby cafe, near the exit door at the very end).
At the elevator bank, select Floor 3 on the digital pad, which will then indicate which elevator to take.

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