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Joel Fremion grew up on Fort Wayne's south side around his grandparents' upholstery and fabric shop — his father worked as an interior designer — and attended North Side High School, where he met his wife Nancy in 1968. He studied at the Fort Wayne Art Institute and in architectural and interior-design programs at Indiana University Bloomington and Purdue. Out of that upbringing he developed the technique he calls "fabric collage": landscapes and portraits built from fabric and leather with painted detail, a medium he is credited with inventing.
Fremion's work is in the permanent collections of the Indiana State Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Haan Museum of Indiana Art and the Midwest Museum of American Art. He won the Hoosier Salon's outstanding first-time-exhibitor prize in 1992, Fort Wayne Artists Guild Best of Show awards in 1994, 1999, 2013 and 2014, and Best of Show at Toledo's Crosby Festival of the Arts in 2021. He ran Old House Galleries in Fort Wayne from 1987 and Indiana for Modern in Uniondale from 2004, and is now based in Ossian, Indiana.
Sources: Artist's site, joelfremion.com; 20 North Gallery (Toledo), October 2023 exhibition text; askART biography; Business People magazine (Fort Wayne); Whatzup.