Clark Fitz-Gerald

In early June 2023, the Castine Historical Society will debut the second season of the exhibition, Clark Fitz-Gerald: Castine’s Celebrated Sculptor-in-Residence.  The exhibit was so popular we are bringing it back with many new sculptures.  This will be a fresh new look at this artist’s amazing career.  For detailed exhibit hours and to learn about the series of related lectures and programs visit www.castinehistoricalsociety.org.

Clark Fitz-Gerald: Castine’s Celebrated Sculptor-in-Residence will explore the life and work of the sculptor, Clark Fitz-Gerald (1917-2004). When Fitz-Gerald moved to Castine in 1956, he had already made a name for himself as a sculptor. Throughout his long career, he achieved regional, national, and international renown for his work. On display will be sculptures lent from private collections, along with Fitz-Gerald’s drawings, historic photographs, and writings from the Clark Fitz-Gerald archival collection donated to the Castine Historical Society by the family in 2017.

The show is guest curated by the art historian, Carl Little who has organized  numerous exhibitions on Maine artists. He is the author of artbooks, among them monographs on Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer, as well as such contemporaries as Jeffrey Becton, Dahlov Ipcar, Eric Hopkins and Philip Frey. He and his brother David Little co-authored Art of Acadia and Paintings of Portland. In 2021, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation presented Little with its Lifetime Achievement Award for art writing.

The exhibition illuminates how Fitz-Gerald found inspiration in such disparate things as the Bible and myth, in science and the natural world, and in the human form. The exhibition will display a sampling from the sculptor’s impressive body of work that touches on these major themes and which is marked by humanity and humor.

In 2017 Fitz-Gerald’s children, Stephen and Leah, donated the Clark Fitz-Gerald Archives to the Castine Historical Society. Their gift, plus loans from devoted collectors, highlight the breadth of the sculptor’s work. From caricatures and creatures to studies for major commissions, from abstractions to an Egyptian queen, this exhibition presents the very model of a major modern sculptor.

This exhibition is funded in part through two grants from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.