Alida Fish: The States Project: Delaware

Alida Fish: The States Project: Delaware by Priscilla SmithSeptember 14, 2021

©Alida Fish, Woman in Shadow, 2017

I’ve long admired Alida Fish’s prolific and sensitive reinvention of the photograph as both a subject and an object. She has steadily manifested surprising experiences of what it means to look at a photograph. I first saw Alida’s manufactured images using printed creatures in the environment before I came to Delaware. Thereafter it seemed she reimagined new formulations of the photograph every year or so: altered photographs, tintypes, hand coloring, toning, chemical stains, oxidizing and transferring onto metal. The series, “Volunteers” is an astonishing juxtaposition of delicate and determined flora and chemical reactions.

Alida Fish is known for one-of-a-kind, hand-altered still-life work using manipulated photo processes. She prints on glass, metal, and a range of artists’ papers. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States in galleries and museums including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, The Portland Museum of Art, The Albright-Knox Gallery, The Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She has received prestigious awards including an Individual Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Masters Award from the Delaware State Arts Council. She has been a resident artist at several institutions including The American Academy in Rome. Alida is professor Emerita at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She is represented by Schmidt-Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, and Alan Klotz Gallery, New York. Follow Alida on Instagram: @alifish2

At the core of my artistic efforts lies an urge that has existed since childhood: the desire to create a world of my own invention. For many years, I have used the camera and photographic processes to bend reality, suggesting rather than describing what is in front of the camera. More recently, with the on-set of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have found solace in nature and have returned to working with plants, finding in them an endlessly rewarding beauty of form, color, and movement.