Tim Fitts Artist Biography
Tim Fitts was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in the South, spending his childhood in Shades Mountain, Alabama, then moving to Clearwater, Florida until finishing college. During Fitts’ college years, he spent years playing music and spent two years working extensively in the Sycom studios at the University of South Florida. a. He has held solo exhibitions in Kwanhoon Galleries in Seoul, as well as the Kaywon School of Art and Design and Suwon University. Fitts later studied creative writing at the University of Maryland. As a photographer, he held his first solo exhibitions at art museums and universities in Seoul and Suwon, South Korea. His images have appeared on the cover of the New England Review and American Literary Review, and his short stories have appeared in the Cimarron Review, PRISM International, Faultline, and others. He created a suite of photographs, Atlantascapes, (2007) for Thomas Deans Fine Art, using the techniques of layered photography.
See:
"Fully Losing Yourself": An Interview with Guest Reader Tim Fitts (Smokelong Quarterly, nd)
Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with Tim Fitts (Smokleong Quarterly, September 18, 2017)
"Sea Bean,". Short story by Tim Fitts (Granta Magazine, online 5 November 2013)
On 46-45 Verandering::
Fitts lead workshops at Zion Hill Memorial Baptist Church and the William A. Barrett Nabuurs Center where he photographed personally-significant objects that the participants had with them and used some of the photographs in a silk-screening workshop conducted with each group. All of this was incorporated in a book, 46-45 Verandering, using some of the workshop-generated imagery as well as Fitts’ photographs (many are details) of the surrounding neighborhood, where derelict public fixtures and vacant property abut very modest, old housing and the occasional new, publicly-funded construction. Fitts describes his interaction with the neighborhood and its residents in a short text, but the title is a mystery to me. [Verandering is a play on the German word Veraenderung, transformation.--ed]
--The Art Blog
In Tim Fitts’ debut short story collection, Hypothermia, characters vacillate between their authoritarian, religious upbringings and their moral consciences. The title story weaves gracefully through the multiverse while trying to make sense of the suffering and tumult of the First Gulf War. Largely set in the late-20th-century South, before cellphones and surveillance impinged upon self-reliance, the characters navigate a fettered path of hope, false expectations and spiritual struggle. Stories from this emotionally wrought collection previously appeared in journals such as CutBank, The Gettysburg Review, and others. Wryly warm, tersely affectionate, philosophically ambitious, Tim Fitts’ short stories are hypnotic. His characters bravely maneuver a worldly meanness to find hope, wonder, and sometimes beauty—which is what we come to fiction for in the first place. Terrific writing, and a great read.
—Laura Lee Smith, author of Heart of Palm
Tim Fitts knows his way around a greasy spoon and a theater, an off-kilter romance, a keyboard, and Gulf War looniness. He explores our personal and social dysfunctions in these idiosyncratic, often funny stories.
—Stephan Salisbury, Senior cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer