The Queer Art of Russell Fitzgerald
The Percy Foundation is funding preparation and publication of a catalogue of the surviving works of Russell FitzGerald (1932–1978), a largely unknown Romantic, mid-century American figurative painter who pursued art as a spiritual calling despite little professional support. The artist struggled with heroin addiction and died at age 45.
Art, sex and metaphysics intertwine in his astonishing allegorical paintings that draw promiscuously from history, myth and the Bible. He was unusually committed to examining his erotic desire for Black men and to understanding the historical forces that prevented the communion between Black and white in the U.S. through his art and writing. However, FitzGerald found few opportunities to show his pictures during his short and tortured life. No one knew what to make of these ambitious canvases based on his unique and ever-evolving interpretation of Christian mysticism, highly literary and narrative paintings with more in common with William Blake than with then-dominant Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism. Made in San Francisco in the late 1950s, New York and Pennsylvania in the 1960s and Vancouver in the 1970s, most of his surviving paintings were donated by his widow to the Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
The Stanford-trained art historian Jon Davies organized the first exhibition of FitzGerald’s work at the Belkin in Fall 2024, “That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald.” The volume he will edit is under contract with the art publisher Information Office in Vancouver, and will include 75 full-color plates as well as essays by Davies and other experts, based on extensive archival research in FitzGerald’s papers and interviews with people who knew him, including the black science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, whose book covers FitzGerald illustrated. It is slated to be published in March 2026.