John Fudge

John Fudge (b. 1940, d. 1999) was a long time fixture in the Colorado art scene, whose heavy influence on the region began in Boulder in the late ’50s, where he was a BFA student, through his untimely death in 1999. He was involved with several of the most significant efforts taken by Colorado artists at that time, including Drop City, Criss Cross, and the founding of Spark Gallery.

As a professor of art at CU Boulder and CU Denver for decades, he left an indelible mark on his art students. Fudge was very much an artist of his era, borrowing pop themes and assembling them into works that fall somewhere between contemporary gothic and cartoon modern. His work has been collected by such notable places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Washington State Arts Commission, the Denver Art Museum and The Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts, in Colorado, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina among others. Fudge received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985 and a Western States Arts Foundation Fellowship in 1976.