Professor Barnaby Fitzgerald, who has been teaching at SMU since 1984, stands with one of his recent paintings. (Photo courtesy of CHRISTINE JONAS)
When writing his “little thesis” in Italy many years ago, artist and professor Barnaby Fitzgerald decided to focus his writings on tapestries. He hated tapestries, but that was the reason he chose this subject to research and write about.
“I don’t like that about myself, I don’t like not liking things. So I’ll go and explore something I don’t like,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s the great thing about research, if you research something you will probably find that you love it. There is a whole world there just waiting to be opened and looked at.”
Just like the choice to study tapestries, Fitzgerald made another unlikely career decision when he found himself relocating his family—his wife and two children—to Dallas to work at SMU.
Compared to the art department at SMU, Fitzgerald had more prestigious job offers, but a life-changing interview made the decision very clear to him.
“When I got the interview with SMU, it was the best conversation I had in years,” Fitzgerald said. “It was very down to earth, and at the same time we discussed philosophy and scientific ideas—how they relate to painting and drawing, and how to propose ways of operating in the classroom that would really teach people things.”
Fitzgerald operates his classroom in a different way than other professors, allowing him to fit in well at SMU initially and still today. He challenges his students in a way that they would not expect and pushes them to grow without them realizing it.
“I’m not going to sound like a lot of art teachers because I think that if you ask people to be individualistic and you ask them to be themselves, you are saying they are sheep and so they have to be taught to be themselves,” Fitzgerald said. “Where as I think they already are themselves, and that comes out much more clearly and definitely when you ask a group of people to do the same thing.”
As a working artist and a professor, Fitzgerald has used his life experiences as a student and a teacher to procure growth from his interactions with his colleagues and students.
“I feel like the different institutions within different settings each provide a unique experience for the student or artist,” one of Fitzgerald’s current students said. “Having these circumstances to call upon while teaching allows Barnaby to pass some of that special knowledge on with great facility.”
Since 1984, Fitzgerald has been a professor of drawing and painting at SMU, but his journey started many years and throughout many countries before that.
Soon after he was born in New York City in 1953, his family moved to Italy. Around the age of 12, his family moved back to the United States to Cambridge, Mass.
“My English didn’t exist. I learned [it] very quickly. It was very traumatic and America was incredibly violent for me,” Fitzgerald said. “I just could not believe my classroom—everyday there was fighting in the streets and people beating each other up. It was a total trauma.”
Because of this troubled adjustment, after a year and a half, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Ireland for six years. From there Fitzgerald went to school in Italy and received his associates degree in printmaking.
He then returned to Massachusetts, this time Boston, where he attended the School of The Museum of Fine Arts in 1974. Then he went to Boston University and graduated two years later with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. In 1981, he enrolled in the Yale University School of Art program after working as a landscape painter in Italy for five years.
He has been a student his whole life and continues to learn everyday. Sharing his experiences and knowledge is something that everyone can appreciate.
“We are all creatures of our experiences,” Mary Vernon, a professor who has been a colleague of Fitzgerald’s for almost 24 years said. “Barnaby Fitzgerald makes all of his cosmopolitan ones available to all of us.”
