Happy 100th Birthday Betty G. Fishman

Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings

Today on December 6, 2023, Betty G. Fishman turns 100!  

If you ask Fort Wayne residents to name a person who has significantly influenced the visual arts in the city more than likely they will think of Betty Fishman, usually for her 16-year tenure as Executive Director of the not-for-profit art gallery, Artlink, from 1990 to 2006. Her involvement at Artlink, however, dates back to its early days, in 1978.  

Betty has held various roles and titles: arts leader, advocate, and supporter. She was a public-school art teacher, co-founded a gallery with painter/friend Ellie Golden, volunteered on numerous boards and committees, worked as an appraiser, and joined groups like the Fort Wayne Designer Craftsman Guild. Betty received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement award from Arts United and the prestigious Sagamore of the Wabash Award from Governor O’Bannon in 1997. The following year, the University of Saint Francis presented her with an honorary doctorate. 

Born in 1923, Betty grew up in Defiance and Hicksville, Ohio. She attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and received her bachelor’s degree from The Ohio State University in art. In 1971 she completed a master’s degree in art education at the University of Saint Francis, which prepared her for a 21-year career teaching art to middle and high school students for the East Noble School Corporation. Always inquisitive and open to new experiences, Betty took classes and workshops at the Fort Wayne Art School, Penland School of Craft, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. 

Throughout her life Betty found time for her own art, exploring a variety of mediums including painting, drawing, cyanotype, textiles, printmaking, and beadwork. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is proud to have several examples of her work in our permanent collection.  

The earliest work in the collection is a charcoal drawing of Albion’s courthouse in Noble County from the 1960s. Northeastern Indiana is home to numerous beautiful courthouses. The Noble County Courthouse is an imposing example of Romanesque-style architecture. Betty’s interpretation is expressionistic, giving the structure and the entire scene a brooding quality. 

During the 1950s-60s, the body was not only the subject but used in the process of making printed works. Yves Klein treated female nude bodies like human paintbrushes in a performance piece, Anthropometry (1960). As instructed by Klein, women were covered in paint and pressed up against a sheet of paper to create abstract prints. Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil created Blueprints (1949-51) in which they exposed people’s bodies to light, creating large-scale photographic prints.

In the 1970s, Betty was incorporating the body into her art, too, but within a different context. In Phases of the Moon II, she used fabric prepared with a light sensitive emulsion to make a cyanotype. On the surface of the fabric Betty laid out a body with bent arms and legs to suggest movement. She arranged leaves, plant foliage, and bits of lace to create interesting patterns around the figure. When exposed to light, the various compositional objects protected the surface from the light, resulting in her subject remaining white in the finished work. The uncovered areas turned a brilliant blue. 

Betty was initially drawn to textiles and design back when she was in college at Ohio State. The museum owns four fabric works by the artist, and she was not alone in her approach. As a part of the feminist movement in the 1970s, artists including Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Schapiro eagerly embraced art forms historically associated with women. Weaving, sewing, embroidery, and quilting were all deemed “women’s work,” which were viewed as inferior to painting and sculpture. In defiance, feminist artists began working in these mediums to explore subjects related to women.  

Betty’s choice of cyanotype is intriguing. Invented in 1842, cyanotype is a photographic process using iron salts rather than silver to yield a monochromatic, Prussian-blue print. While the process was commonly used by architects and engineers for blueprints of their designs, some women artists in the 1970s, such as Barbara Kasten and Sheila Pinkel, experimented with it.  

Anna Atkins is known for her pioneering work in cyanotype. Was Atkins among the reasons that Betty and these artists chose the medium? Atkins was one of the first women photographers and published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), the first book with photographic images. Cyanotype also appealed because it does not necessitate a dark room full of chemicals. Betty also enjoyed collage, and by using this camera-less process she could reuse materials.  

In Women’s Work Is Never Done actual pieced fabric and eyelet trim frame the printed composition, which includes squares of patterned fabric, playing with what is real and what is printed. Betty repeated silhouetted profiles in dark, light, and one, suggestive of the moon, encircled by an embroidery hoop. The use of the silhouetted profile appeared in art periodically during the 1960s and 1970s. Rubin’s vase—the vase/face optical illusion—was a recurrent motif in Jasper Johns’ work.  

Betty’s prints in the collection are much smaller in scale than the textile pieces. Woodpecker, from the 1980s, likely depicts a red-headed woodpecker with its bold red feathers. Betty aptly chose woodcut as a medium, making gouge marks of different sizes to expressively represent the layers of feathers and the rough texture of tree bark.  

Ovenbird has the identifiable features of the songbird with its stripe on the crown and dark spotted chest. The etching needle allowed Betty to create fine details in the birds plumage and the leaves and stems of wildflowers on the forest floor. These prints reveal her love of nature and wildlife. While she lived in southwest Fort Wayne, Betty’s patio was verdant, filled with potted herbs and flowers in the summer, all intermixed with art. She always looked after the ducks in the neighborhood pond and fed them, expressing great concern about their welfare as she was leaving Indiana. Not long after moving to Princeton, New Jersey in 2018 Betty resumed sketching outdoors. 

Countless students, professional artists, and Fort Wayne residents have benefited from Betty’s years of service to the community. Her entire time living in the city she was working to create opportunities, promote the arts and artists, and build the foundation for the vibrant art scene we are fortunate to enjoy today; for example, she organized Fort Wayne’s first documented fine arts fair in 1958. Today, we see a profusion of public sculpture, murals, galleries, and a continual flow of art events across the city—a far cry from the environment she encountered when she moved here around 1949. Betty regularly comments that she probably wouldn’t recognize Fort Wayne anymore. 

With gratitude, admiration, and much love, I would like to wish Betty a very happy birthday. 

For further information about Betty G. Fishman and Artlink, see Art in the City: An Artist Looks at the Gallery Movement in Fort Wayne: Artlink by Karen Thompson.