Born in 1925 and bred in Fowler, Colorado, a small farming community surrounded by flat, wide prairies and a distant view of the Rockies, Connie Fox received her BFA in 1947 at Un. of CO, and afterwards attended Art Center School, LA for a rigorous program of drawing, perspective, rendering, and composition. She received her MA at the Un. of NM, Albuquerque in 1952, where she then taught and met artists Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) and Robert Dash (1931-2013).
Connie’s work was shown in the 1950s through the 1970s in Albuquerque, San Francisco, the Richmond Museum of Art, and in Manhattan at the “Tenth Street” type Camino Gallery, FAR, and later at Ingber Gallery and Brenda Taylor Gallery.
Connie’s works are included in the collections of many major museums across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall, as well as National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Her Sammy’s Beach series, painted between 2007-2014, formed the body of work in her most recent solo exhibitions with Danese/Corey Gallery, NY and the Heckscher Museum. Fox originally created the pieces in this exhibition for The Home Show, Vered Gallery, 1989, a show of artful furniture designed collaboratively by Connie Fox and William King, sculptor. King said of this show, “It’s all functional.” Fox gave it the subtitle “What a Girl from Colorado Thought Paris Looked Like in the 1920’s”.
Fox’s paintings can be set in context with, but were also freed by Abstraction, yet she defies the Abstract Expressionist tag, old or new, and has been described as a “modern classicist” whose paint gestures and compositional elements are part of a “comprehensive formal vocabulary.” She herself spoke of her affinity with the European Surrealists, not just in art, but also in the use of visual imagery as in the avant-garde films of Cocteau and Fellini, to which she was exposed as a student at the Art Center School in LA.
Having started her family in New Mexico and Berkeley, California, she went east as far as Pittsburgh in the 1970’s and then, on the encouragement of Elaine de Kooning, she established her home and studio in East Hampton, NY in 1979. A foray into larger and larger paintings spanned the 80’s and 90’s and into the first ten years of the 21st century, once she built her new studio not far from Elaine’s home and studio, and Sammy’s Beach. Throughout these decades Fox progressively created her own artistic identity as a painter. “I can relate anything to anything,” she said, in relation to her use of composition, texture, and surreal images. “I’m more interested in what things do than what they are,” said Fox.
Amei Wallach wrote, Fox was “a super collider of painting…[who] accelerates particles of line, shape, dimension, improbable hue…into emanations of energy. The integrity and sheer exuberance of her life in art is exemplary and it is rare.”
Connie Fox and her husband, sculptor William King, made their home together and worked in the studios they built in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods through the last 40 years of Fox’s life. Both Connie and William were honored as inductees in the Hamptons Fine Art Fair 2024 Hall of Fame last summer.
Photo: Marc Veit Schwaer
Image courtesy of Megan Chaskey