Vernon Fisher favored Fort Worth, and a film on the late artist will be screened there

Breaking the Code, the award-winning documentary film about acclaimed mixed-media artist Vernon Fisher of Fort Worth, will be screened on Dec. 2 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

After the screening, former Modern chief curator Michael Auping will moderate a panel discussion with director Michael Flanagan and artists Sedrick Huckaby and Linda Ridgway.

The 2 p.m. screening is free, resulting from a partnership between the Modern, the Lone Star Film Festival and the Fort Worth Film Commission.

Fisher died in April at his home in Fort Worth from complications of a previous illness, according to reports. A few days later, Breaking the Code premiered at the Dallas International Film Festival at Violet Crown Cinema in Dallas.

In Dallas, the documentary won Best Historical Film, an award presented by the Dallas County Historical Commission. It also won Best Documentary Feature at the Rockport Film Festival and Best Cinematography at the South Texas International Film Festival.

Through November, the film is also streaming on PBS’s Frame of Mind series and available on KERA in Dallas.

Born in rural Texas in 1943, Fisher began as an abstract painter and integrated text into his works.

His art has been displayed at the Modern in Fort Worth, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and more. His art has been exhibited alongside that of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Fisher described his art as “an allegory of our interactions with the stuff we call the world. It is a metaphor for our finding our way. I see myself more as an observer than anything else. I just see all this stuff and point to it. I am like a comedian who simply walks on stage and reads a newspaper. You don’t have to make it funny or absurd: It already is.”

Fisher taught at the University of North Texas from 1978 to 2009 and is credited with helping mold a new generation of artists.

Flanagan, a McAllen resident, started work on the documentary in 2019 as part of his master’s thesis at UNT. In 2021, Flanagan expanded the project into a 47-minute feature after an infusion of funding.

Flanagan said in April that he was struck by Fisher’s resistance to move to the world’s art centers where his contemporaries flocked.

“Most artists, when they have that kind of an opportunity, relocate to one of these centers of the art world, maybe New York or Berlin, or Paris or Los Angeles. Vernon certainly had that opportunity,” Flanagan said.

“But he was true to himself, and that meant staying near his family, his friends and the culture he was inspired by.”