Frederick Abrams is a proverbial Renaissance Man, who has worked as an installation artist, photographer, video filmmaker, musician/composer, graphics designer, architectural designer and stained glass artist, art magazine editor & art director, restaurateur and educator. A native of Los Angeles, he studied sociology and contemporary culture at the University of California at Berkeley. He has lived in Portland, Oregon, New York, Paris, Barcelona and Wrocław, Poland and is currently residing again in Los Angeles.
His artwork has been recognized in historical events including the US Bicentennial exhibition at the Xerox Corporation in NY, 1989 Bicentennial of the French Revolution exhibition at the Paris Historical Library and several shows of his work were sponsored by a group of art activists, who played a vital role in the 1989 nonviolent revolution in Poland that swept across Eastern Europe and ultimately led to the fall of the USSR.
From 1976 – 1980, he was editor of Glass Art and GLASS magazines, which documented the evolution of glass as a new contemporary art form, for which he was recognized in TIME magazine.
His early architectural glass work was commissioned for residential, commercial and public spaces, including Marriot Hotel at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and the Embassy Suite Hotel in Indianapolis. His last permanent installation resides at the Badalona International Business Centre in Barcelona, Spain.
Abrams was the art director for the popular music monthly, Rock magazine, which won the Maggie award in 1985 for the most improved magazine of the year in the United States.
From 1996 to 1999, his very first short musical films won first prize for documentaries, music and sound illustration in festivals in France, Spain and Italy.
Invited to Poland via a US Consulate program for cultural exchange, he was sponsored to present exhibitions of his first digital artworks by leaders of an underground artists’ movement associated with the Solidarity Party, which resisted the totalitarian system throughout the 1980s era of Martial Law. In 1997 he presented a multimedia concert based on his original compositions, which was performed by a ten-musician ensemble of both classical and rock musicians, himself playing electric guitar at two prominent Polish international media festivals, WRO Festival in the western city of Wrocław and for the Audio Art Festival in Warsaw. From 2005 – 2011 he restored a medieval tower in Wroclaw, where he owned and operated an art gallery, cultural center, wine bar and restaurant. In 2011, the Guardian newspaper regarded it as the first place to visit in all of Poland. During this time, Wrocław was selected to be the annual 2016 Cultural Capital of Europe.
Articles about his now more than three-decade-long project, The Underground Cathedral, which concerns an aesthetic-metaphorical study of subway/metro systems worldwide, have been published in several languages, one of them a cover article by the International Union of Public Transportation in Brussels. In 2013 Abrams was invited to be a guest speaker at a historical conference in London, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the London Underground and an article documenting the history of his work was published in a commemorative book, Going Underground – New Perspectives, by the London Transportation Museum.
In 2015 he designed and oversaw construction of a multimedia building, Abrams’ Tower West, which opened in West Los Angeles in 2017. It includes his own private art gallery and an open-air upper lounge, which has since been used for a variety of artistic, cultural, educational and social purposes. He’s currently working on synthesizing and integrating a half of a decade of development of The Underground Cathedral, including a remake of his award-winning film and a new live performance based on the original concept.
