Sheppard Gallery | William L. Fox lecture

Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery
Church Fine Arts Building
University of Nevada, Reno

Closing Lecture for the Walker & Walker exhibition ill heard, ill seen:

William L. Fox
Thursday, April 3, 2008
5:30 - 6:30pm

William L. Fox is a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations. Fox was born in San Diego and attended Claremont McKenna College . He has edited several literary magazines and presses, among them the West Coast Poetry Review, and worked as a consulting editor for university presses, as well as being the former director of the poetry program at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

In the visual arts, Fox has exhibited text works in more than two dozen group and solo exhibitions in seven countries, served as the Associate Director of the Nevada Museum of Art, and then as the visual arts and architecture critic for the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper. In late 1979 he went to work at the Nevada Arts Council, first as the Coordinator of the Artists-in-Residence Program, then Deputy Director, and in 1984 Executive Director, a post he held until leaving in 1993 to write full time.

Fox has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than seventy magazines, has had fourteen collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eight nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. He has taught rock-climbing at the University of Nevada , as well as led treks in the Himalaya . In 2001-02 he spent two-and-a-half months in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. Fox has also worked as a team member of NASA's Haughton-Mars Project, which tests methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. He was a visiting scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, has twice been a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

[nb: CCAI commissioned an essay by William L. Fox' in 2003 as part of the inaugural talk of our Nevada Neighbors series.]

[photo from William L. Fox' Web site]