Celebrating 20 Years: A Journey Through America With Robert Freimark

A Love Letter to America

at THE FRANK MUSEUM OF ART AT OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY in Westerville, Ohio 

Happy Birthday, America:

Robert Freimark's Fifty States Embarks on a National Museum Tour

An Artist’s Portrait of a Nation

What does America look like when you stop looking for recognizable landmarks?

What does a state feel like—its geography, history, contradictions, memories, and sense of place. When all of those things have to be translated into color, shape, rhythm, and abstraction?

Robert Freimark spent years asking precisely that question.

At the Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University, A Journey through America with Robert Freimark brings together Fifty States, Freimark’s remarkable suite of abstract color screen prints created between 1960 and 1968. One work for each state, the series is not a collection of conventional landscapes or illustrated travel souvenirs. Instead, it is an ambitious attempt to understand an entire country through the language of abstraction.

Curated by Christian Hohmann in collaboration with HOHMANN Fine Art Gallery, the exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter America not simply as geography, but as memory, history, experience, and imagination.

And in 2026—the 250th anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—the timing feels particularly resonant.

Fifty States, Fifty Impressions

Freimark did not create these works from a distance.

To make Fifty States, he traveled throughout the United States, drawing upon firsthand experiences, observations, and extensive research into the history of each state. Each print became a kind of visual synthesis: part geography, part history, part personal encounter.

The result is a series that asks a deceptively simple question:

How can an artist capture the spirit of an entire place without simply depicting it?

Freimark's answer was abstraction.

Rather than reproducing famous buildings, mountains, highways, or city streets, he searched for something less tangible—the distinctive character of each territory. Geography becomes color. History becomes structure. Personal experience becomes gesture.

The individual prints can therefore be read both independently and collectively. Each represents a particular state, but together they form something larger: a portrait of a nation constantly negotiating its own identity.

America as Experience

There is an important distinction between traveling through a country and truly observing it.

Freimark approached the Fifty States project as both traveler and researcher. His impressions of each state were combined with historical investigation, allowing the works to move beyond personal travelogue. The prints became layered constructions in which physical place and cultural identity meet.

This approach is central to understanding the series.

A state is never only its landscape.

It is also the people who inhabit it, the histories that shaped it, the conflicts it carries, the industries that transformed it, and the stories it tells about itself.

Freimark attempted to bring those layers together within the limited vocabulary of a single sheet of paper.

The result is an unusually ambitious artistic project: fifty individual works functioning simultaneously as fifty portraits and one enormous portrait of the United States.

The Journey Behind the Work

The story of Fifty States is inseparable from Freimark's own life.

Born in Michigan in 1922, Robert Freimark developed into a distinctly American West Coast abstract expressionist, working across painting, watercolor, drawing, printmaking, tapestry, and sculpture.

But his artistic development was interrupted by World War II.

Freimark spent seven years in the United States Navy, serving throughout the war. His experiences had a profound impact on his understanding of violence and on his responsibilities as an artist. He later described his wartime experience as leaving him deeply disillusioned and opposed to war, and he regarded communicating that experience to fellow citizens as one of his commitments.

That history adds another dimension to Fifty States.

The series can be viewed as an exploration of American identity, but it was created by an artist who understood that identity as something far more complicated than patriotic symbolism. His America was a country of extraordinary geographic and cultural diversity, but also one shaped by conflict, memory, movement, and historical consequence.

A Portrait of America Without a Map

There is something especially compelling about encountering Fifty States today.

We live in an era of satellite imagery, digital maps, instant travel, and endless photographic documentation. Almost any place can now be represented literally, immediately, and in extraordinary detail.

Freimark chose another path.

His question was not What does this place look like?

It was closer to:

What does this place mean?

That shift—from appearance to essence is where the power of the series lies.

The works invite viewers to slow down and consider what makes one place different from another. They ask us to recognize that geography is never purely physical. It is experienced, remembered, interpreted, and continually reinvented.

From the United States to the World

The history of the series itself mirrors the journey it depicts.

In the 1970s, Freimark exhibited the works throughout Europe while on sabbatical with his wife and daughter. In 1976, the Fifty States series became the official United States bicentennial offering at the opening of the Amerika Haus in Munich.

The project subsequently traveled internationally, bringing an abstract vision of America to audiences far beyond the country that inspired it.

Half a century later, its return to public view offers another opportunity to consider the relationship between American art and American identity.

At The Frank Museum, that conversation takes place within an institution dedicated to global art, giving Freimark's distinctly American project an international context.

A Journey through America with Robert Freimark

Frank Museum of Art
Otterbein University

August 19 – December 4, 2026

Public Reception: October 1, 2026, 4–6 p.m.

Curated by Christian Hohmann in collaboration with HOHMANN Fine Art Gallery.

Works by Robert Freimark are available through HOHMANN. We invite you to discover original paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints online or by appointment at the gallery. A comprehensive catalog devoted to Robert Freimark and Fifty States is currently in preparation.

50 States preview at HOHMANN, Palm Desert

"California" | 1962 | Serigraph | Edition of 71 | 18 x 24 in, framed 26 x 31.5 in