Incite ⁐ Insight

Richard Fishman’s career as a professor at Brown University spanned 50 years until retiring from teaching in 2017. His art studio practice and exhibition history extend across six decades and continue to this day.

While Incite ⁐ Insight is not a career retrospective, the exhibition honors a lifetime dedicated to curiosity, exploration, and discovery. Alongside a selection of Fishman’s sculptures in the Lower Gallery—ranging from his most recent investigations to works created during his tenure at Brown—the exhibition also features an eclectic collection of works by former students, colleagues, and friends in the Upper Galleries to reflect the spirit of experimentation and inquiry that Fishman fostered throughout his career.

Richard Fishman’s work has long considered the impact of time, and the presence of something mysterious and compelling below the surface -or beyond-  that is revealed through the transmutation of organic forms. He captures moments of flux, freezing and exalting transitional states so that his audience can pause and witness what is fleeting. The most recent sculptures are 3-d printed renderings of desiccated plants and bones. Realized several times larger than life, ranging from 12 to 36 inches, and infused with highly saturated pigments, the shriveling leaves of a cabbage mysteriously resemble swirling swaths of solidified vapor and fragments of bone become like enchanted geology samples. Interspersed with these pieces are sculptures from his Elm Tree Project - made from pieces of a 100-year-old elm that succumbed to Dutch elm disease on the Brown University campus and part of a larger, collaborative effort that Fishman launched between Brown and Rhode Island School of Design for students and faculty to work with the wood from the tree in multidisciplinary projects. Spontaneous Nature, made from a slab of the elm’s trunk, is a ten foot tall leaning silhouette form. Its sealed surface coats and preserves evidence of high-contrast black and white patterns of the disease’s process, offering a contemplative experience of the fractalization of nature within the shadow form of past lives, while Mendlebrot’s Brother, is a free standing sculpture rendered at a more intimately human scale (six feet) draped with a jagged and bristly shroud of resin-coated carbon fiber.

Nearby, in the upper gallery, is a varied selection of works by artists who have, in one way or another, formed a deep connection with Fishman along his fifty-year career. Many of these artists are former students, some are colleagues, others worked for him in his studio, all of whom have come together to assert the importance of mutual collaboration and the sharing of insight from artist to artist.

In his statement about his work as an artist and educator, Fishman writes “My classroom became a laboratory for behavioral and sensory experiments. I didn't want to teach mere technique; I wanted to tap into memory and actual life.” Eventually he discovered that “Teaching became a form of making.“

The through line of the work is a shared history of being incited by Fishman’s impetus towards deliberate experimentation. For the show’s participants, Richard acts as a catalyst for unexpected possibilities. His inclinations are not only seen in his own practice, but in the work of so many artists he has influenced —unlocking unforeseen ways of making and ways of being.