American artist Fred Eversley, who quit his aerospace engineering job to pursue art, died at 83 on March 14th. David Kordansky Gallery, which started representing the artist in 2018, confirmed the artist’s death, which followed a brief illness.
With a career spanning five decades, Eversley is most closely linked with the Light and Space Movement of California in the 1970s. His sculptures, crafted from resin and noted for their glossy, transparent qualities, are inspired by scientific phenomena. In recent years, the artist also began working with stainless steel. In November 2024, Eversley unveiled his largest public installation, a 16.5-foot-tall parabolic steel sculpture titled Portals (2024), in West Palm Beach, Florida, near the historic First Church of Christ, Scientist, designed by architect Julian Abele.
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Eversley pursued science from an early age. Inspired by his father, who worked as an aerospace engineer, Eversley studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated from the program, where he was the only Black student at the time. After graduating, Eversley took a job at Wyle Laboratories, a company that supported the Apollo missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Before becoming an artist, Eversley began to form relationships with artists around Los Angeles. He offered technical advice to Light and Space artists such as Larry Bell. His life took a turn in 1967, when he crashed his car. While recovering for around 13 months, the artist was introduced to polyester resin by artist Charles Mattox. By 1969, he took over John Altoon’s studio in L.A., where he began to make his parabolic sculptures. Soon after, Eversley quit his job at Wyle and decided to pursue art full-time.
Eversley’s work was inspired by his scientific training. He became known for his parabolic resin sculptures, but he took an interest in several other interstellar forms, such as dead stars or black holes. He began with small sculptures; however, as his career progressed, his works became increasingly larger. Examples of these sculptures include the eight-foot-tall “Cylindrical Lenses,” most recently shown at David Kordansky Gallery in 2023 and 2024.
Eversley was chosen as the first artist in residence at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1977. Though he did not gain gallery representation until 2018, his work was the subject of institutional solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C. in 1981, the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Virginia in 2017, and the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2017.
In 2023, Eversley unveiled one of his largest works, Parabolic Light (2023), a 12-foot-tall transparent resin sculpture, at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in front of New York’s Central Park. The sculpture was commissioned by Public Art Fund. The same year, Carnegie Mellon University awarded Eversley a doctor of fine arts degree.
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