Vernon Fisher, internationally known artist from Fort Worth, has died

Tina Medina remembers her first encounter with the artist Vernon Fisher.

Medina, a Dallas artist and curator, was a first-semester master’s in fine arts student at the University of North Texas. She had just set up her studio. Fisher, a professor, peaked in.

He looked around, pointed, and immediately critiqued her work. He liked one but not some others. He left.

She wasn’t used to having a professor so abrupt and honest. But as she studied with him, he eventually became an ardent supporter of hers. Now a Dallas College art professor who works in various media, including painting, fiber arts and performance art, she recalled another moment.

“I’d say, ‘I don’t think this will work. The galleries won’t pay attention.’ He’d say, ‘That’s the galleries’ problem, not yours.’”

Numerous students, colleagues and friends shared similar memories of Fisher as an intellectual, quick-witted and kind gentleman who could have moved anywhere but chose to spend his life in Fort Worth with his widow, the artist Julie Bozzi. Fisher’s death was announced Monday by the Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, Califorina. He was 80.

By the time he joined UNT in 1977, Fisher had shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Biennial in New York. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995 and was a three-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He is in more than 80 collections.

His personality was evident in his art, which is at once funny, brooding and full of pathos.

That kind of attention is unprecedented for a local artist who didn’t leave his sometimes cloistered, insular hometown. But the fact he stayed here was a good measure of his personality, friends said. Dennis Blagg, a Fort Worth artist and friend of Fisher’s for 40 years, called him an “aw shucks” kind of guy.

Martha Peters, director of public art at Arts Fort Worth, added a Fisher work was the first by a Fort Worth artist in the collection on display at the Fort Worth Convention Center.

Hiram Butler, a partner at the prestigious Houston gallery Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, described Fisher as an artist “who made great work and never worried about the market” who was also a mentor and friend.

“I wish I could have done half as much for Vernon as he has for me,” Butler said. “Vernon was one of the artists who helped back me in 1984 and was ever loyal.”

Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, which represented him for 30 years, described Fisher as a legendary and challenging artist and teacher.

Fisher may have become one of the state’s most famous contemporary artists, bestowed with the university’s highest honor as a regents professor and who influenced young artists, curators, and gallerists. He didn’t forget his humble origins, however, nor the professor who mentored him.

He grew up in rural Texas. Painting was for houses, not art. But the English undergraduate student at Hardin Simmons University in Abilene took an art class with Claudia Webb Betti Benson his senior year. He stuck around for an extra year to get a extra degree in art.

“She was an excellent professor who saw his potential,” recalled Jack Davis, who was chair of the art department at UNT, where Benson later taught. After graduating he then pursued art, receiving his master’s in fine arts at the University of Illinois.

When an open painting and drawing position opened up at UNT in 1977, Fisher was already a professor of art at Austin College in Sherman. Benson thought he’d make an excellent candidate.

“We wanted someone who was thinking about the contemporary world,” said Davis, who rose from chair of the art department to dean of what became the College of Visual Arts and Design.

Fisher met the qualifications and was hired. During his tenure at UNT, Davis noticed his teaching style was uncannily similar to Benson’s. They related to students in the same way.

Fisher came onto the art scene at the right time, said Michael Auping, the former chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, who curated “Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism,” a 2010 retrospective of his work.

Everyone learned something from him, it seemed. “The fact that he was a teacher was a huge part of his impact. There are not too many artist teachers who make it in both fields, but Vernon found a way,” Auping said.

Alison de Lima Greene is the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has worked diligently since 1986 to acquire Fisher’s work and that of other prominent Texas artists.

“Looking at the larger arc of Vernon’s career, he always struck me as one of the truly great chroniclers of the American landscape,” she wrote in an email. “Dairy Queens, strip malls, and late-night television, as well as lone protagonists, were described and depicted with a sly compassion. He was a great storyteller, and he wore his profound erudition lightly as he intertwined the visual and the written into narratives that once seen were never forgotten.”

Had he gone to New York City, he’d be even more famous, said Blagg, his longtime friend. But he was content in Fort Worth. They would hang out at their then-studio, Artspace 111 on the edge of downtown, and watch the Dallas Cowboys. They played touch football when they were nimbler, he joked.

He was his favorite artist who also taught him a lot.

Patrick Kelly, the executive director and curator at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany outside of Abilene, was among his students and gallery assistants in the 1980s. “When he shared his opinion of what you had created, you knew he was being tough but honest,” he said. “But he expected engagement and hard work — all for your benefit.”

Even after his retirement, he still inspired students, even those who weren’t his.

Michael Flanagan met him in 2019, as a graduate student studying documentary arts. His work was on display in a new art building. A prolific documentarian of artists, he decided in late 2019 to make a documentary about Fisher.

“Breaking the Code” was three years in the making and premieres this weekend at the Dallas International Film Festival on Saturday and the Thin Line Film Festival in Denton on Sunday.

“Bob Dylan said the highest thing an artist can achieve is to inspire,” Blagg said. “Fisher certainly did that. I’m going to miss him.”