Jorge Fick

Fick grew up in Detroit and first attended art school in Guadalajara, Mexico. He changed his first name from George to Jorge in homage to Latin culture, which he adored. After graduating from Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina in 1955, Fick moved to New York, where he worked with Franz Kline and was introduced to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. In the late 1950s, Fick traveled to San Francisco, where, through his friend, the poet Robert Creeley, he absorbed the culture and rhythms of the Beat Poets. Fick was also an outstanding colorist, a skill he honed doing dye transfers for the environmental photographer Eliot Porter, and as a color consultant to the renowned designer Alexander Girard, with whom he collaborated on his famed project for Braniff Airlines. 

Fick’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Harwood Museum, Taos, NM; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Roswell Museum, NM; and the Smith College Museum of Art, North Hampton, MA.