Parrish Stoddard

 My undergraduate education was at The San Francisco Art Institute in the early sixties and my final year was specifically working with Richard Diebenkorn. Ansel Adams was teaching there at the same time and I had a one-on-one conversation with him about photography. Diebenkorn rarely wanted to be seen as being a part of a movement. That influenced me and as a result I felt inclined to eventually experiment with different mediums. Richard Diebenkorn wrote a letter of recommendation for me to attend Columbia University since I wanted to be located in New York City.  I did my graduate studies there but at the end of a year, I moved to The Art Students League of New York on the advice of Lehman Engel.  I started with Larry Poons but soon discovered the inspiring Sculpture Studio in the basement of The Art Student League of New York. I met Jose De Creeft who had studied under Auguste Rodin in France. He taught me much about bronze and marble.

       In Old Town Alexandria Virginia the Athenaeum Art Gallery in a competition gave me an award for my bronze sculpture “Crab Apple Tree”.

       Later I found my way to Pietrasanta, Italy, where Michelangelo worked. There I shared a studio where Henry Moore worked.

     On the heels of this I was given a private studio space by the Vice President of International House in NYC for the purpose of organizing a show for all the artists in the house.  Around this period of time, I had attended a VIP launching at Cape Canaveral and witnessed one of the first Gemini flights. However later the piece I executed was about APOLLO 204 where our three astronauts tragically died in flames on the launching pad. That piece was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute at the time of the incident, 1967.     

      Soon I moved to Boston and sold works to people who knew me, but I was never drawn to galleries. As an artist I was most interested in how art could evolve from moments in history, such as the space effort. I was enlisted to become the Artistic Director of an 1860 Russian Folk Wedding that took place at Sander’s Theatre, Harvard University.  Forty years of Harvard research stood behind it.   I had a two- year appointment at Harvard teaching students about “Seeing music and Hearing Art.” (Synesthesia) By getting as close as they could, it gave them a means for making something new.

    When my appointment was completed at Harvard, I was quickly picked up by The Globe Foundation, and asked if I would encourage those with grants in the educational system in Boston to teach students about the Arctic. I said, I would if I could do it under the auspices of being an artist. They agreed. There were many processes to go through, but eventually I was invited in by the Inuit people to learn about their culture. The process of making art from what I learned, writing, teaching. exploring Polaroid Transfers and writing poetry took a number of years.