Her oil and mixed media paintings explore themes such as gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics, in a style that weaves together realism, abstraction, and classical influences.
Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, South Carolina, and raised in rural Hyde Park, New York, where she attended Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School.
"[7] Many of Fraleigh's paintings rework well-known compositions by Old Masters, and in the process, the artist stages feminist interventions by giving the women who traditionally played peripheral roles more narrative agency.
Of these all-female communities and relationships present in Fraleigh's artwork, Baum has noted that her paintings "serve as utopic provocations of the best sort: counter or oppositional narratives that allow us to imagine different pasts and different futures.
"[11] The subversion of the male gaze is a common theme in Fraleigh's paintings, yet sexuality is never entirely absent in these works, and is explored alongside "other kinds of desire that can exist between women, like friendship, love, camaraderie, and tenderness.