Becky Franco

Born in Havana, Cuba. I escaped with my family in 1961. Gaining from Pratt Institute a BFA with Honors. Influenced by the Photo Realist movement of the seventies. I sought work in the totally male-dominated field of Outdoor Advertising. I was given the opportunity to paint billboards and became the first female billboard artist in the industry to join The Sign & Pictorial Display Union.

I painted billboards for fifteen years. When computers threatened the industry. I shifted, I became an independent art professional, gaining many Painting and Mural commissions, featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and a Rizzoli book, Tromp L’Oeil At Home, by Karen Chambers.

Always interested in refining my abilities, I returned to academia to attain an MFA from Queens College, New York, in 2010. Large-scale, concept-driven photorealist paintings of interiors with opulent ephemera are how I engage viewers, finding my truth. While photorealism may seem conventional, I use my brushes and paints in an audacious way, fashioning bourgeois interiors haunted with an odd perspective, questioning the perception of unlikely luxurious objects, and welcoming the unanticipated viewpoint. I meander this world as a social anthropologist; the way the light hits my sparkling chandelier catches my eye, leaving me breathless.

From my underprivileged immigrant beginnings in Brooklyn to the stark affluent suburbs I watched with desire the luxury driven culture searching for self-esteem, The cravings of my neighbors disclosed in the contents of their home influenced me.

My work grapples with issues of identity and values attached to possessions. Living amid that lifestyle and painting billboards advertising objects of desire, captivating consumers, informs and influences my work’s scale, style, and substance, exposing my own subconscious nature.

My work has been exhibited widely. I have shown at The Rosenthal Library, Queens College, Chelsea, Soho, Oheka Castle, The Islip Art Museum, and El Museo Del Barrio all in New York, The Audrey Love Gallery, and The Cleveland Clinic.

I was A CINTAS FELLOWSHIP Finalist in 2014, and I was also featured at Art Talk: Public Hyperrealism to Intimate Reality, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 2020, I was awarded The Deering Estate Artist Residency. In 2026, exhibited at The Deering Estate Exhibition MARMORIS at The Arts Garage, Delray Beach, Florida.

I continue pursuing with passion creating good paintings as an Independent Art Professional and exhibiting my work.