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Organized December 18, 1959
The guild: The Fort Wayne Artists Guild — the documented guild line for the city's visual artists (no Fort Wayne "Art League" appears in the record reached) — was begun through the impetus of Jim McBride and eighteen alumni of the Fort Wayne Art School, who held their first organizational meeting on December 18, 1959, and adopted the guild's name. Much of its early institutional memory was lost when the flood of 1986 ruined its scrapbooks and records, as the guild's own history plainly says. Its annual Ventures in Creativity exhibit is its flagship, and its membership today is given at nearly 200 artists; a September 2026 report noted the guild had opened its own gallery in Fort Wayne, named for Virginia Stoner Huguenard, late in 2025.
The crafts circle: Alongside the guild stood the Fort Wayne Designer Craftsman Guild, counted among the affiliations of Betty Fishman — art teacher, appraiser and the longtime director of Artlink, whose own earlier gallery venture with Ellie Golden, the Goldfish Gallery, showed work in downtown apparel-store lofts before Artlink existed. Fishman's profile in the gallery movement is carried with Artlink below; the art school's alumni and teachers are in Notable People.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Artists Guild, "About Us" (fortwayneartistsguild.org) — the McBride impetus, the eighteen art-school alumni, the December 18, 1959 meeting, the 1986 flood loss of records; John Kelty biography (artnatureconsortium.org) — membership near 200.
- Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, "Happy 100th Birthday Betty G. Fishman" (December 2023) — the Designer Craftsman Guild membership; Whatzup, "Betty Fishman" — the Goldfish Gallery with Ellie Golden.