Biography

Photo credit: Kristy Leibowitz

Clark V. Fox was born in Austin, TX, in 1946. His father in the Army Air Forces, Clark spent the first five years of his life in Honolulu before the family moved to several cities throughout Texas, including Galveston, Houston, Corpus Christi, Hereford and Amarillo. In 1960 just before Clark entered high school, the family settled in Washington, D.C. Clark attended high school in Alexandria, Virginia, a period during which he had a studio with fellow classmates, David Lynch and Jack Fisk. Clark studied with Japanese art master Unichi Hiratsuka at the Japan-American Society of Washington, D.C. (1964-1965). Clark spent his first year of college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (1965-66) with part-time stints at Andy Warhol’s “The Factory” studio, after which he returned to D.C., where he received his BFA in 1969 from the Corcoran School of Art. He soon became involved with the Washington Color School of Painting, where he apprenticed with artist Tom Downing (1967-1969) and which brought him to the attention of James Harithas, then Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. Clark received a more hands-on introduction to the art world by accompanying Harithas to parties, exhibition openings and studio visits. Harithas would often see him in museums, studying and sketching various works in the many collections throughout D.C. In the 1970s, while protesting the second Indochina war, Clark found himself living between Paris and New York City. 

It was then that he would become involved in the Situationist International and Fluxus Mail art school through Ray Johnson, while studying the works of Georges Seurat and Marcel Duchamp. In the 1980s Clark got involved in the D.C. Hardcore scene (his band, Twisted Teenage Plot, once opened for Fugazi at The White House) and the New York City No Wave movement with the noise-rock band Gag Reflex. He would later open MOCA, D.C., an art gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C., that exhibited the works of Shepard Fairey, Ron English and Mark Lombardi, among others. Clark also ran a conceptual art space Flat, out of his New York City apartment hosting experimental works of art. Harithas and Clark maintained close contact through it all. Clark’s work is in over fifty of the most prominent institutional collections in the United States, including Yale University Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, American University Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, The Phillips Collection and the High Museum. His work is in numerous notable private collections, including the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection and the Richard Brown Baker Collection. Clark’s grants and awards include a Ford Foundation Grant (1965), First Purchase Award at the National Drawing Society Eastern Regional Exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1970), and Purchase Award, 35th Corcoran Biennial (1977).