Richard Lindsey Fort was born July 6, 1922 in Mitchell, South Dakota, the youngest of three brothers. His father was principal of the local high school and his mother had taught grade school. Both played piano and his mother composed piano music, teaching Dick to play. As a boy, he painted and drew, including cartoons. In summer the family enjoyed camping and hiking in the Black Hills, west of Rochford. The family later bought a cabin in the area, by Spearfish Canyon creek. There Dick fished for trout, hiked, climbed, explored and fell in love with the Black Hills. After a visiting teacher showed Dick and his father how to fashion roadside alabaster into boxes, Dick taught himself how to sculpt the material. The Fort family later moved from Mitchell to Sioux Falls, where his father became Superintendent of Schools. Dick graduated from Washington High School there in 1940 and went on to Grinnell College in Iowa, majoring in English and German.
Called up from the army reserves in 1943, Dick first trained for World War II as a combat engineer at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. But he was soon singled out for advanced training in a special German language unit at Kenyon College in Ohio. In 1944 he trained in London as crypto-analyst in a mobile Signal Service Company. Following D-Day at Normandy, Dick served as a code-breaker, intercepting German war-front radio messages in France, Belgium, and Holland, moving with the troops in their march to the Elbe River and down into southern Germany. He was awarded battle stars for pin-pointing enemy artillery and armored positions during his war-time intelligence work, especially in the Battle of the Rhineland. Dick mustered out of the army at Christmas 1945, in England. Suffering from undulant fever due to contaminated milk in France, he spent a year recovering at his parents’ home in Sioux Falls. Returning to Grinnell College in 1946, Dick used credits from his wartime German training at Kenyon to graduate in one semester. Thinking to become a novelist, in 1947, Dick began work on a master's degree in English at the University of Chicago. But in 1948 he switched to studio art at The Art Institute of Chicago, under the GI Bill. He completed his BFA in three years, and the equivalent of an MFA in 1952. Dick taught Art History and Studio Art at Grinnell during 1952-54, but decided in 1955 to try to make a living as an artist in Chicago. He put together a comic strip featuring a cowboy, a horse, and a pheasant as main characters, along with game-playing dinosaurs (reminiscent of fossils found in South Dakota). The Chicago Sun Times found the style too abstract for readers used to simple action plots with square-jawed, two-fisted cartoon heroes like Steve Canyon. An Indianapolis newspaperrejected his comics also,
and Dick found himself working as a night clerk in a hotel. But narrative and design elements reminiscent of his unsuccessful venture into cartooning were to reappear in some of Dick’s works in one later phase of his painting. In 1956 Dick began a 28-year career in the Humanities Department of Wilbur Wright College, one of the seven two-year City Colleges of Chicago. During a 1960s sabbatical, Dick returned to Europe, this time to visit galleries, museums, cathedrals and other architectural landmarks. His travels included Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Rome, Florence, Athens, and Istanbul. He drew upon experiences abroad both for subjects of several paintings and in preparation of instructional “core material” to share with his teaching colleagues for the art and architecture units of an introductory general humanities course they taught in common at Wright College. On his off hours in the 1950s and 1960s, Dick ventured out from his Near North Side apartment to sketch and later paint scenes of people in cabarets and lounges along the famous nearby Rush Street nightlife area of Chicago. In the early 1970s Dick joined with a younger colleague and a house painter to open a small gallery on trendy North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. Funded by Dick for a couple years, the Triforum Gallery in front offered space for aspiring local artists to show contemporary works and, in back, provided his own studio space. | A Brief Biographical Sketch of Dick Fort continued...
Among influences upon his own paintings, Dick counts traditionalists such as the French painter Poussin; though in Dick’s version of “St. John on Patmos,” the unique ecosystem of the Black Hills replaces the island, while an angel visits an old prospector instead of the saint. The “Pop Art” craze of the 1960s included comic strip characters, encouraging the long fascination with cartoons to be seen in some of Dick’s paintings from that period. He also cites Abstract Expressionists such as DeKooning and Jackson Pollock, along with Surrealism, as influencing his portrayal of human images mixed in with the designs emergent in views of some Black Hills rock strata and topography. In summers Dick returned to the Black Hills to paint and plan. Inspired by the “geodesic dome” architecture of Buckminster Fuller, Dick designed and built a small one-room dome house near the family cabin in Spearfish Canyon. In 1973 he bought property on land higher up, between nearby Cheyenne Crossing and Lead, itself not far up the road from Deadwood. Moving the small dome to his forested land, Dick used it as prototype of a full size dome house
built mostly by himself. He used Fuller’s basicpentagonal construction units, supplemented by some inside vertical supports. With the dome completed, and rooms later added on two sides for visiting family and friends, Dick took early retirement from Wright College in 1984 and settled in. Storing many of his earlier canvases and silkscreen works in garage and shed, Dick began composing music on an electronic keyboard, including 24 symphonies and a musical inspired by interest in the traditions of Native American neighbors in the Black Hills. He was a founding member of a group of cross-country ski enthusiasts, helping to scout out and clear new ski trails in the summers. He led others in organizing actions for return to Spearfish Creek some of the water dammed up and diverted to process ore during the 1870s Deadwood Gold Rush days. Dick began an environmental journal that also reports actions against renewed exploitation and degradation of the Black Hills by gold and uranium mining interests, along with efforts to oppose both pollution by industrial hog farming and the dumping of garbage from other states in South Dakota. In late summer he and friends gather buckets of berries from roadside choke cherry bushes, which Dick brews into several gallons of homemade wine based upon a recipe perfected over the years. | Appreciation of his paintings and sculptures in the dome house led artistically inclined local friends to help him mount and frame many of Dick’s stored paintings for two showings of his works, generously sponsored by the Historic Deadwood-Lead Arts Council. The first show was in January 2007 and included 50 paintings, both Black Hills landscapes and a few outdoor scenes from Chicago’s Near North Side and lake front, along with several of Dick’s alabaster sculptures. A second show followed in late March and April 2008, held above the historic Lead Opera House being restored by the HDLAC. It highlighted Chicago nightlife in the 1950s and 1960s, but included some works from other phases of his artistic career. More recently, friends and family of Dick have been involved in production of a professionally done video highlighting the artistic and environmental facets of Dick’s varied career, rooted in his abiding love of the Black Hills. No wonder a local newspaper once proclaimed Dick Fort the king of the Black Hills trails! (Completed May 1, 2014, the foregoing material is based upon two interview sessions with Dick Fort on August 30, 2013, by his former Wright College colleague Don Sanborn, of Geneva, Illinois.) Dick died September 13, 2016 at the Fort Meade VA Medical Center near Sturgis, SD, with family and friends at his bedside.