Art Metropole

#16968

That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald

Editor

Jon Davies

Price

$45.00

Date

2026

Publisher

Information Office

Format

Catalogues

ISBN

9781988860268

Genre

Queer Art & Artists

That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald is the first major publication devoted to artist Russell FitzGerald. Bringing together newly commissioned scholarship and more than 90 reproductions of paintings, drawings, illustrations, archival material the book offers the first comprehensive account of an artist whose ambitious vision has remained hidden for decades.

Russell FitzGerald (1932–1978) was a visionary artist and illustrator (notably for his friend Samuel R. Delany’s sci-fi novels) who worked in 1950s San Francisco, 1960s New York, and 1970s Vancouver. Rejecting the dominance of modernism, FitzGerald pursued a deeply personal figurative art grounded in America’s fraught history of racism, religious pictorial traditions, and literature, myth, and occult practices (beyond his relationship with poet Jack Spicer, FitzGerald is best known for his Tarot deck). Long overlooked, FitzGerald’s queer artistic vision grew from his unique spiritual cosmology based in his attraction to blackness and Black men. Edited by Canadian art historian and curator Jon Davies, this handsome volume brings together reproductions of the artist’s work and other material with new texts by Davies, Dodie Bellamy, and Jamie Parra to return FitzGerald to art history and consider his relevance to the present.