-Vernon Fisher was born in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1943. He received his BA at Hardin-Simmons University, in Abilene, Texas, in 1967, and his MFA at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1969. He taught art at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, through 1978, and at the University of North Texas, in Denton, as a Regents Professor. He was awarded two Individual Artist's Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1980 and 1981, and in 1995, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award.
Fisher's home site at artnet, Artist Works Catalogues, quotes the artist in an interview given in 1989:
"Texas is all about the vastness of space. You have only to drive west of Fort Worth about thirty or forty minutes to get a sense of it. A place like Fort Worth is neither urban nor rural; you're in an urban environment and then you drive through rural areas to get to more urban areas, and then out west in the great plains it's very rural. A little further west, where I like to go, it's really desolate: the landscapes rises up out of the horizon and comes toward you as if it were on a conveyor belt. Out in places like Big Bend, you're in the midst of an overwhelming nature. Total solitude. Then to come back to a suburban area like Fort Worth--it can be sort of schizophrenic. I think you can see it in the work: the sublime juxtaposed with the mundane."?
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There follow three older expressions of Fisher's protest art. Two date from the 1980's, and the date of the third is 1991.
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Breaking The Code (1981)
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And
From The American West (1986)
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And
When You Lose Your Mind (1991)
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(Courtesy of Charles Cowles Gallery, artnet and its Artist Works Catalogues)
