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1952 - present
The start: Dale Enochs, born in 1952, is a native of Fort Wayne, and his art began, as Davisson's teaching line would predict, at home and at the city's school: he remembers wanting to be an artist at five, painting at his grandmother's house, where she made small Victorian paintings of her own. He graduated from Bishop Luers, concentrated in ceramics at the Fort Wayne Art Institute, and took his bachelor's in fine art from Indiana University, Fort Wayne, in 1977.
The stone: At Indiana University, Bloomington, where his master's of 1981 still focused on ceramics, the material changed under him. His yard backed onto an old railway, and along the tracks lay free limestone; he built his studio there and began to sculpt in the stone he had first thought god-awful ugly. In the mid-1980s the retired professor Kenneth Yasuda opened Japanese aesthetics and landscape architecture to him, and the limestone compositions, raw harvested pieces married with steel and bronze, became the signature: in 2016 the Indiana State Museum named him one of the top 200 artists in Indiana's history for its bicentennial exhibition, "200 Years of Indiana Art."
The homecoming: Enochs lives and works from a farm south of Bloomington, acquired in 1989, its barn converted to a sculptor's studio. But the permanent installations that anchor his record stand in the city he started in: "Figure Ground III" in the University of Saint Francis sculpture garden in 2016, "Bend" and "Double Exposure" at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in 2017, the latter, limestone, steel, and bronze, permanently installed in the museum's atrium, and "There are Rivers," a permanent installation at the same museum, in 2021. The Davisson pattern completes itself: the school trained him, the south gave him stone, and the hometown museum built his work into its walls.
Sources:
- Long-Sharp Gallery, essay and CV for Dale Enochs (essay by Mark Ruschman, Indiana State Museum) (a native of Fort Wayne; the 1977 and 1981 degrees; the top 200 Indiana artists honor of 2016; the Bloomington farm of 1989).
- Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, Elizabeth Goings, "Treasures from the Vault: Dale Enochs's Double Exposure" (3 December 2018) (born 1952; the grandmother's paintings; the railway limestone and the studio; Kenneth Yasuda in the mid-1980s; Double Exposure of 2017 permanently installed in the atrium; a Fort Wayne Art School alumnus).
- The artist's resume (Figure Ground III at the University of Saint Francis, 2016; Bend and Double Exposure at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 2017; There are Rivers, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, 2021).
- Whatzup, featured artist profile of Dale Enochs (Bishop Luers and Fort Wayne Art Institute graduate; ceramics concentration at the Institute).