Publisher’s Note: Glasstire is pleased to be the exclusive digital distributor for Michael Flanagan’s award-winning documentary Breaking the Code: The Art of Vernon Fisher, which chronicles the life and work of the iconic Texas artist. To learn more about the documentary, and to stream the film in full, please see below. You can also watch the film directly on YouTube.
Vernon Fisher in front of the “Breaking the Code” installation, 1981
Winner of several awards including “Best Historical Film” at the 2023 Dallas International Film Festival, Breaking the Code is a documentary about Vernon Fisher (1943-2023) that utilizes rare archival materials and interviews with the artist and his contemporaries to introduce Fisher to a new generation while also giving the many who already know his work an intimate look at his life and art.
Born to rural Texas farmers in 1943, Vernon Fisher’s childhood exposure to painting was only as “something you did to houses.” By the 1980’s, he was exhibiting alongside Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, establishing himself as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Throughout his career, Fisher was also an influential art professor at the University of North Texas.
Artist Jeff Elrod is a former student and describes his time with Fisher as “life-changing.” Another former student, Baseera Khan, recently won the 2023 MTV reality show, The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. Both artists are featured in Breaking the Code. The film also features MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Dave Hickey, and the acclaimed art historian, Frances Colpitt, in two of the final interviews recorded before their respective deaths in 2021 and 2022.
Vernon Fisher, “Who Am I,” 2020
Vernon Fisher, “Savage Youth,” 2020
Vernon Fisher (1943-2023) was an multimedia artist born in Fort Worth, Texas. He has had over eighty one-person exhibitions, including installations at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His work is now in the permanent collection of more than forty art museums.
Vernon Fisher, “The Ship of State,” 2020
Fisher used a wide range of media to create large-scale paintings and installations that appropriate referents from vernacular architecture and pop culture and imply complex visual narratives. He is known for his blackboard paintings, which employ a slate-gray ground reminiscent of a chalkboard’s layered patina. The associations of erased texts and banal classroom moments complement the representational fragments, symbols, and texts that occupy the foreground of these works. Incorporating photography, painting, sculptural elements, found objects, and written language, Fisher’s art contributed to the overthrow of monolithic modernism in the late 1970s and early 1980s and won him enduring acclaim nationally and internationally.
Vernon Fisher painting.
Michael Flanagan is a filmmaker from McAllen, TX. Michael works as a Project Manager for the River Pierce Foundation, writes on Texas visual art for Glasstire, and has taught courses in Media Arts at the University of North Texas. His films have been screened internationally at spaces including the Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Cadogan Contemporary in London, Club de l’Étoile in Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
CREDITS:
Produced and Directed: Michael Flanagan
Executive Producer: Bob Ackerly
Associate Producer: Jeremy Rovny
Edited: J. Lee Scurry
Director of Photography: Davin Fitch
Original Music: Kirsten Soriano
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