William L. Fox

William L. Fox

Founding Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, and has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published sixteen books on cognition and landscape, hundreds of essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Among his nonfiction titles are Aereality: On the World from Above; Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent; In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle; and The Void, the Grid, and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. Fox is also an artist who has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in eight countries since 1974. He has twice been a Lannan Foundation Writer in Residence.

Fox has researched and written books set in the extreme environments of the Antarctic, the Arctic, Chile, Nepal, and other locations. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and Nature. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club and he is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, the Australian National University, National Museum of Australia, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Fox serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Archaeologies of Landscape in the Americas book series and ARID: Journal of Desert Art, Design & Ecology.








Four Black Corners
William L. Fox & David Arnold, 1985

In 1984 the San Francisco-based photographer David Arnold and I took a drive in my CJ-5 Jeep from Reno to Pyramid Lake. We had removed the doors and roof from the vehicle so that David could photograph at will while we were moving. He took a number of film-based photos that he then printed in various collaged formats indicating the seriality and motion of the drive and its image capture.

Later that year and into the next I wrote a series of minimal, iterative texts about the imposition of a black figure on a white ground, and the relationships among fore- and backgrounds. I typed and over-typed the texts on an IBM Selectric typewriter, then ran them through a Xerox photocopier multiple times. The original paper texts were often folded, torn, and moved while being xeroxed, all references to both the driving experience and David’s photographs.

The machine used was on the first floor of the Nevada State Council on the Arts (now Nevada Arts) on Flint St., a building a block from the Nevada Museum of Art and the roof of which is visible from where I’m writing this in the Center for Art + Environment. I worked clandestinely at night, which meant that when I left the top of the copier open while working, I could obtain a dark background, part of the play of words and intent.

After I had obtained what I considered a coherent series of works, David then rephotographed and mounted them in 1985. This final manifestation was, on average, the eighth physical iteration of the texts. Kathy Kuehn, book artist and master printer at Pace Prints in New York, created two clamshell boxes for the completed series. The 22 images were used as an exhibition set as the work was shown during the late 1980s and early 1990s.