The images in my art are inspired by basic human needs: shelter, food, clothing, work, and intimacy. They take the form of the human body, human artifacts and architecture, and vegetable and animal life. In my sculpture, prints, and drawings, the natural world connects with the human-made world. Reality and fantasy meld.

I use traditional methods and materials – such as modeling and casting – to achieve non-traditional results, employing clay, plaster, wood, paper, fabric, and plants to concrete, resin, metal, rubber, plastic, and video. The site is usually the inspiration for my art.

My public projects have been specific responses to architecture, history, and landscape. Commissions have been sponsored by Pinellas County Cultural Affairs (Florida), Broward Public Art and Design Program (Fort Lauderdale); Burlington City Arts (Vermont); Wave Hill (New York); and the Musée d’Art Contemporain (Montréal). My art has also appeared in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York); the Tampa Museum of Art (Florida); the Kunsthaus (Hamburg); the Centre des Arts Visuels (Montréal); the Couvent des Cordeliers (Paris); and Exit Art and Artists Space (New York City). Corporate and public collections include Whole Foods Market, Kohler Arts Center, Gulf Coast Museum, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, and Tampa Museum of Art; as well as private collections nation-wide.

I taught studio art at the University of Vermont and St. Michael’s College, and in the M.F.A. program at Vermont College, and New College of Florida. I received a B.A. from the University of Vermont, an M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and attended the Central School of Art and Design in London.

Born in Montreal, I divide my time between Winooski, Vermont, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

"Leslie Fry makes much of nature's bounty. Ms. Fry has produced a group of wonderfully wacky architectural ministructures that appear to be made of real fruit and vegetables . . ."

Grace Glueck
"Silo Meets Satellite Dish in the New New England"
The New York Times

“The look of Fry’s reliefs perhaps takes some inspiration from medieval cathedral reliefs. After viewing images of those at Orvieto Cathedral in Italy, I was struck by the comparison of gothic reliefs of angels, trees, and human beings, all imbued with a spiritual life. The reliefs serve a dual purpose, both narrative and symbolic. Moreover, Fry’s constructions give the effect of old stone in the rubbed whites and dark grays.”

Arlene Distler
“Accumulated Mysteries: Leslie Fry”
Art New England

"Fry is a surrealist; she creates ironic visual nonsequitors that read like oddly natural metaphors. By marrying parts of ordinary objects together into bizarre objets d'art, she transforms the familiar into weird fantasy forms all her own.
In the 'ruin' Fry successfully combines conventional objects - shoes, dresses, nuts and fruits - with classical architectural elements. These odd juxtapositions seamlessly hold together because of her meticulous attention to detail, acute sense of perspective and form, and single-minded focus on an idea. A pile of rubber molds in the corner of the back room is part of the installation. These cast-offs from the castings are 'skins' shed in the process of the evolution of Fry's work. It seems like a natural extension of the main event."

Anne Galloway
"Leslie Fry: More than she appears to be"
The Times Argus, Montpelier, Vermont

"Unexpected scale works for Fry … Small, flat plaques of sea life on cast paper reflect the artist's concerns with the environment and whimsy, which both pervade the show."

Ann Albritton
"Leslie Fry/Allyn Gallup Gallery"
Sculpture Magazine

"In both sculpture and prints she explores complex social and personal issues using metaphor, allusion and iconography, ultimately expressing her views on significant "defining" issues, such as transformation, acceptance, belonging, growth and sexuality. Here she addresses issues and feelings associated with relocation and assimilation."

Elaine Gustafson
Director of Exhibitions & Collections/Curator
of Contemporary Art
From the exhibition Amor Eterno
Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida

“And Leslie Fry’s Lips Speaking Together (see inside front cover) is both a beautiful celebration of the female body and a quirky affirmation of female solidarity and camaraderie.”

Nancy Smith
“Empty Dress, Loaded Images”
Ms. Magazine

"Leslie Fry, for example, creates delicate, highly charged objects that explore the boundaries between interior and exterior, male and female, clothing and skin. Like a poet who recombines familiar words to describe experience in completely new ways, Fry uses familiar clothing forms, fabrics, and references to the body to create previously unimagined hybrids. Her small, diaphanous forms meld internal organs and external anatomy, clothing forms and body parts, and male and female anatomies. By transgressing boundaries that most of us experience as immutable, Fry invites the viewer to consider the body anew. Her works are at once challenging and funny, vulnerable and defiant."

Janie Cohen, Director
From the exhibition catalog for Disembodied
Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, Vermont

“It’s springtime, and Leslie Fry’s garden is abloom – with human-like sculptures that, artistically speaking, have one foot in the botanical world and another in ancient architecture. Or medieval culture, or the animal kingdom. It’s an eclectic mix, part fantasy and part metaphor. Fry’s works create a sort of mythical surrealism, where human-looking skin, bone and sinew meld with leaves, roots, tree limbs and animal features. The combined effect bridges the gap between the human and natural worlds, between physical and psychological landscapes.”

Ken Picard
“Body Works”
Seven Days
Burlington, Vermont

“Those works are like tart sorbet to refresh the palate, so take them in and you're ready to ponder the extravagant installation by Leslie Fry. Quercus Emancipation occupies a diagonal sweep of wall and floor space. It helps to know your classical architecture (and a little Latin) to appreciate its droll elegance. The acorn is the central symbol - quercus is Latin for an oak tree - and, as we all know, mighty oaks from little acorns, etc. Anyway, a circular plaster medallion sits high above us, a bas-relief of acorns, its center spewing strands of hemp. Our eyes are led to a big - very big - plaster cast of a man's head resting on the floor. Before we see his face, we see a long trail of more hemp coming from a topknot of more acorns. His noble face, like a relic from antiquity, could be a found object. But examine his features and you see that the beard and irises of his eyes are made of dozens more tiny bas-relief acorns. Further on, a village of little heads rests on a shelf, looking like - you guessed it - acorns, tinted in earthy tones. Fry is making a circular statement about those little nuts and big trees. Think, too, of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias, with its "shattered visage" and tale of greatness undone by time.”

Lennie Bennett
“Tampa Bay artists exhibit their wit”
St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Florida