Presence, a large bronze sculpture of a woman`s head, was installed at Harvard Business School in 1989. In her 1990 biography Mary Frank, art historian Hayden Herrera described how the work came to be: “When [Mary Frank] closed up the Lake Hill house and returned to New York in the fall of 1985, she left a large clay head drying in her studio. The temperature dropped below freezing, causing cracks to open on the sculpture`s cheeks and forehead. When she returned the following spring, she watched the cracks lengthen and move toward the woman`s eyes and mouth. ‘They had their own beauty,` Mary recalls, ‘but I knew I would have to destroy the piece. One day the sculptor Alan Siegel dropped by and suggested that I cast it. So I did. I never would have thought of it myself.` Head tilted back, eyes closed, lips open, the woman, like Persephone [another sculpture for Frank`s from the period], offers herself to and imbibes the world around her. For all her fleshy substance, the vivid blue patina makes her seem a concretization of air” (p. 191).
