Frederick Hayes was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1955. He received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1980s where upon he began his professional career. Working with a variety of media including charcoal, acrylic, found material, cut-steel and using an installation format his early work consisted of portraits of African Americans within the predominately black community of Western Addition in San Francisco. Armed with a camera he would walk the streets asking its citizens to pose for him, go back to the studio and construct drawings, paintings and sculpture that ultimately became composites of those individuals instead of exact representations. In 1997 he got his first opportunity to show these portraits in the first “Bay Area Now” after one of the curators saw the work in a local non-profit gallery. Since that time he has exhibited nationally at the Drawing Center, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Addison Gallery of American Art, and the San Francisco of Modern Art. Hayes has also been the recipient of numerous awards, worked on public projects and participated in Artist Residencies such as the Headlands Center for Arts in Marin California and MacDowell Colony in Petersburgh, NH.