Clark Fox: Beyond Obedience

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Beyond Obedience, a major solo exhibition surveying nearly six decades of work by Clark V. Fox (born 1946) at the gallery’s 251 W 19th Street location in Chelsea. Clark Fox is an American artist whose singular practice defies conventional distinctions between abstraction, Pop art, political painting, and cultural critique.

Clark Fox is an artist’s artist if there ever was one. At almost 80, his name is known and admired among an interesting group of his elders and peers. As a very young painter, he both emulated and influenced Washington D.C. artists such as Thomas Downing, Gene Davis, Jacob Kainen, and Sam Gilliam. They influenced Clark’s early incarnation as a Washington Color School painter.

Living his entire life between D.C. and New York, by 1970 the artist had moved from abstract to representational painting. His important series of “architectural” paintings began with his inspiration from an “Edward Hopperesque ” building he viewed from the Manhattan bridge. In New York, Clark befriended such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Jo Baer, Jennifer Bartlett and Mary Heilman and was for years close to the collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel. He briefly attended the Pratt Institute in New York and, for longer, the Corcoran School of Art in D.C.

Clark’s practice of copying paintings in the National Gallery of Art led to his intimate knowledge of the famous “Vaughan Portrait” of George Washington, now in the collection of the Everson Museum. The artist’s inveterate habit of using certain subjects as variations on a ( generally editorializing) theme is essentialized in his ongoing series of paintings of our first president.

Clark is a direct descendant of the Cherokee and Powhaten Indian tribes; both his parents spoke, in his childhood, of their ancestors' experiences during the “Trail of Tears” when Cherokees were driven out of the Eastern states. The family tradition in this artist’s family was one of radical resistance to “internment” in the reservations. They lived in a place beyond obedience.

The artist grew up as a military kid, moving across the country. In high school, he befriended and shared an art studio with the director David Lynch and Lynch’s cinematographer Jack Fisk; the subversive sensibilities that these artists imparted on one another never left Clark.

Between 1996 and 2006, the artist ran a commercial space in Georgetown that he used as a venue for art exhibitions of his own choosing that he called “DC MOCA.” At this stage in his life, the artist changed his name to Clark V Fox and increasingly embraced and adopted Native American imagery and radical ideological ideas into his activities. At DC MOCA, Clark met the young Roger Gas tman and together they mounted and filmed one of the first explorations of graffiti art. In the last 20 years, the artist has focused increasingly on his Native American heritage and the many tragic cultural depredations of its history. He has become both more satirical and more literary in his representations of contemporary culture, and ever more bold in his graphic style. He continues to paint in series—of historical figures such as American presidents, of still life icons such as the orange and pear—and his character Mr. Peanut, who always signifies Capitalism. He has represented his favorite Indian Chiefs, among them Sitting bull, Goyaale and Cunne Shote; he continues to make eccentric sculptural pieces, both wall-bound and free standing.

In 2022, a major retrospective of Clark Fox’s work, “Subversion and Spectacle,” was presented at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas. This important show was organized by the legendary curator and museum director James Harithas, who in the 1960s was one of the first people to recognize Clark’s uniqueness. It is now followed by this equally spectacular show at Ethan Cohen Gallery, which is reminiscent of the artist’s earliest incarnation as a “color school painter” in Washington D.C.