Frances Norma Loring LL. D. (October 14, 1887– February 5, 1968) was a Canadian sculptor.
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Biography
Loring was born in Wardner, Idaho, on October 14, 1887 to mining engineer Frank Curtis Loring (1859–1938) and Charlotte Moore. She studied at multiple schools including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Switzerland, the Academie Colarossi in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, and at the Art Students League of New York.
At the Art Institute of Chicago Loring met Florence Wyle with whom she was to have a lifelong partnership. In 1909, Loring moved to New York City and was soon joined by Wyle. The first of the three studio homes they would share over their lives was located on MacDougal Alley, a lively artist colony in the heart of Greenwich Village. Living at no. 6, a converted stable with additional living space, they sculpted well-known portrait busts of each other.
In 1913, Loring and Wyle moved to Toronto, where they began being referred to as "The Girls." As curators observe, such an appelation is one of "pre-sexual, adolescent identity", suitable to the ultraconservative Toronto of the day. It had overtones of homosexuality.
Both of them quickly became major forces in the city and across the country, getting major commissions during World War I and II. In Toronto they rented a studio-home that occupied the top-floor above a carpenters shop at the corner of Church and Lombard Street called Hunters Inn. Eight years later, in 1920, Frances (aged 33) and Florence (aged 39) bought "The Church" at 110 Glenrose Avenue in the Moore Park neighborhood. The Loring-Wyle Parkette, located a block north of "The Church," at the northeast corner of Mount Pleasant Road and St. Clair Avenue East, is now home to their sculpture busts of each other. In 1928, Loring and Wyle were founding members of the Sculptors' Society of Canada with Alfred Laliberté, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Wood's teacher and husband Emanuel Hahn and Henri Hébert. In addition to being their studio-home, The Church became the official head office for the Sculptors' Society of Canada and a gathering place for Toronto's artistic community. A. Y. Jackson called The Church "the most fascinating gathering place in the country" and it has been described as the closest Toronto came to having a Bohemian salon. Robertson Davies based characters on them and The Church in The Cunning Man.