That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald

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Russell Fitzgerarld, “Carnival At New Hope Or The Agony To Be Loved (detail),” 1961

(Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of Dora Fitzgerald, 1992)

Opening Reception:Thursday, 5 September from 6 to 8 pm

Offering the potential for ongoing research and reconsideration, the Belkin’s collection emphasizes artists’ practices that challenge the status quo, with an emphasis on the Canadian avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s which developed an international network and continues to have a significant impact on the art of today. Through an invitation to guest curator Jon Davies to respond to the Belkin’s collection, he has developed an exhibition that considers our collective responsibilities as caretakers of artworks and as shapers of reconsidered and increasingly urgent narratives.

Russell FitzGerald (1932–1978) found few opportunities to show his pictures during his short and tortured life. No one knew what to make of these ambitious allegories based on his unique interpretation of Christian mysticism, figurative and literary works with more in common with William Blake than with abstract expressionism or minimalism. Made in San Francisco in the late 1950s, New York and Pennsylvania in the 1960s and Vancouver in the 1970s, it is miraculous that any “FitzGeralds” survived at all. The artist struggled with addiction and died at age 45. His widow Dora donated almost all of the extant works to the Belkin and they have now been organized into a survey.

That Directionless Light of the Future grapples with a difficult and overlooked figure, exploring how the most idiosyncratic artists can crack open familiar art historical narratives. FitzGerald was in dialogue with an eclectic group of contemporaries from Scottish balladeer and occultist Helen Adam to sci-fi novelist and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, and some of these contemporaries are included in the exhibition.

The exhibition explores how secret and subcultural knowledge complicates archiving and transmission; and how artists both reflect and are out of joint with their historical contexts, consumed as they are with their own cosmologies and drives. Through his singular perversity, FitzGerald shines a new light on the aesthetic, sexual, racial and spiritual imaginaries of the postwar avant-garde.