Artist-in-Residence

Terry Fox

A green umbrella with a tan wood handle, supported by a black metal armature. A red strip of fabric stretches from its center toward its outer band, acting as a sundial.
Terry Fox, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Locus Solus, 1992. Nylon umbrella, screenprinted nylon ripstop, wooden handle, 23-inch radius, 46-inch arc, 40.15-inch diameter. Edition of 16, 2 APs. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

A pioneer of conceptual art, Terry Fox is known for his body, performance, and auditory works. Active in both New York and San Francisco during the 1960s and 70s, Fox’s early work used his own body as the object of performance. He later incorporated recorded audio into his projects, including his celebrated symphonies incorporating a cat’s purr. During the mid-1980s, Fox turned to creating objects rather than strictly focusing on performance.  

Fascinated with the interaction between language, objects, and time, Fox developed a confounding object during his 1992 residency. Created as an edition of 16 umbrellas, Locus Solus (meaning “the solitary place”) features a silkscreened sundial strip sewn to its underside, awaiting activation from a sunbeam. 

The work shares its title with Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel where a wealthy inventor invites friends and colleagues on a tour of his estate. Each object is more bizarre than the last and none of the inventions serve a practical purpose. What might the inventor’s guests make of a sundial attached to an object that is not only mobile but meant for a rainy day?

Art

From the Archive

A blank canvas umbrella with another strip of raw canvas attached. The raw strip of canvas is marked with numbers. The ink has spread to become illegible.

A blank canvas umbrella with another strip of raw canvas attached. The strip of canvas is tied around the upper part of the wooden handle. The metal armature for the umbrella is gold.

Artist Bio

American, 1943–2008. Live and worked in San Francisco, CA and later Belgium and Germany. 

A pioneering conceptual artist, Terry Fox achieved international recognition for his installations which combined auditory and interactive elements. His work often examines limitations of the human body and mind, the interaction between language and objects, and how we interact with time and space. Fox graduated from Issaquah High School in Washington, hoping to study art in Rome, Italy. He attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Rome for only three months before the school was shut down due to strikes. Undeterred by the abrupt end of his formal art education, Fox continued to create independently. He was awarded the Visual Artists Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts four times over the course of his career. In 1977, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. Later in 1996, he received the Jackson Pollock Grant. Fox exhibited solo at The Kitchen, New York, NY; the University Art Museum Berkeley, CA; and Galerie Löhrl, Moenchengladbach, Germany, among others. In 2024, a posthumous solo exhibition entitled All These Things are Sculpture was hosted at the Artists Space, New York, NY. His works reside in multiple public collections, including but not limited to the San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf, Germany; and Museum of Modern Art Istanbul, Turkey.