Back

Frazier, Barbara Brown

Barbara Brown Frazier
August 30, 1914 - Sept. 10, 1988

Barbara grew up in Amesbury (Massachusetts) and made a reputation as a teen as a portrait artist who'd studied in New York at the Art Students League with Dmitri Romanovsky (Russian/American, 1887-1971) and in Rockport/Gloucester with Emile Albert Gruppé (1896-1978).  She also attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida.

She married Stuart Frazier from the neighboring town of West Newbury, and after Stuart spent World War Two as a part of the American contingent to the Ultra Project, the team that that cracked the German codes in Bletchley, England, they settled in Townsend, Massachusetts, near Fort Devens (Ayer, MA) where he taught cryptology and code-breaking as a civilian. 

Barbara served as the town librarian for some years, single-handedly changing the library over to the dewey decimal system, and moved to 30 Pleasant Street on Nantucket a handful of years after Stuart's death in 1966.

Her son Douglas was the AAN president for one year from 1976-1977; her son Robert was the AAN president for five years from 1999-2004.

Here she turned to a second career in art, painting landscapes in acrylic that spanned two decades, much of that under the tutelage of Philip Burnham Hicken from his studio on Pine Street. She was valued member of the Artists' Association of Nantucket from 1970 to 1988, including five solo exhibitions at the AAN's The Little Gallery, the last in 1988.