Vernon Fisher of Texas - art and awards.

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-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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(Courtesy of Charles Cowles Gallery, artnet and its Artist Works Catalogues) 

Authors Bio:
I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco as a Clerk-Typist, GS-4. I was active in the USFS's union for several years, including a brief stint as editor of The Forest Service Monitor, the nationwide voice of the Forest Service in the National Federation of Federal Employees. Howsoever, I now believe my most important contribution while editor of the F.S.M. was bringing to the attention of F.S. employees the fact that the Black-Footed Ferret was not extinct; one had been found in 1980 on a national forest in the Colorado. In 2001 I retired from the USFS after attaining the age of 60 with 23 years of service. Stanford University was evidently unimpressed with my efforts to make USFS investigative reports of tort claim incidents available to tort claimants (ie, "the public"), alleging the negligence of a F.S. employee acting in the scope of his/her duties caused their damages, under the Freedom of Information Act. Oh well. What'cha gonna do?