Arline Fisch - Life

Life

Arline Fisch (born 1931) was born in New York, New York. She learned to sew and weave from her mother and picked up a passion for the color red from her father while growing up in New York. She studied at Skidmore College, receiving her B.S. in Art in 1952. She received her M.A. in Art in 1954 from the University of Illinois. After teaching for two years at Wheaton College, she traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark on a Fulbright Grant to study silversmithing. She has received three additional Fulbright grants, one to conduct further research in Denmark and two to lecture in Austria and Uruguay. She has taught at Wheaton College, Skidmore College and San Diego State University, where she retired in 2000. She has exhibited extensively all over the world in group shows and solo exhibitions.

Arline Fisch is best known for the way she handles metal in her pieces. Her book, Textile Techniques in Metal for Jewelers, Textile Artists and Sculptors, is a demonstration of the techniques she developed while trying to combine the textures of weaving with a metal material. She works with thin wire to create forms that have been manipulated in similar ways to knitted or braided fabric. She has cited jewelry of ancient cultures as being a continued reference and inspiration for her work.