Fort Wayne Artists: Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers

The Artists · The makers Fort Wayne kept, and the ones it sent out

Fort Wayne never had an art colony and never tried to. What it had, from 1836 on, was a working trade: a portrait painter who could make a living at the head of the Maumee, a school on West Berry Street that taught drawing and painting for ninety years and then folded itself into the university, and a museum that kept the homework. The artists who came out of that arrangement divide into two companies. The first stayed: Horace Rockwell painting the founding families, Homer Davisson teaching two generations and going home to Pontiac Street, the Berry Street faculty of the 1950s and 1960s running what their students still call a golden era. The second left and carried the birthplace with them: the most famous living American artist of the last half century was born on a Fort Wayne street in 1941, the man who put flowers all over Milan began as a Fort Wayne painter, and Boise's artist of record for thirty years learned his trade painting shop windows for his family's Fort Wayne business. A third company never lived here at all and is here to stay anyway, in bronze: the sculptors the city hired when it wanted its heroes at heroic size. What follows is all three companies, each on the record that fixes them to this city, and no one on a lesser claim than that.