Edwin Fulwider
(1913-2003)
Edwin Fulwider was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1913. In 1938 he graduated from the John Herron Art School (now part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art) where he studied under Henrik Mayer and noted Hoosier Group artist William Forsyth. He also worked with Thomas Hart Benton while Benton was working on a mural in downtown Indianapolis. In 1936 Fulwider won the prestigious Milliken Traveling Fellowship which allowed him to study in Europe. Afterward he lived and worked in Nashville, Indiana, and was one of nine Indiana artists chosen to exhibit in the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. In 1940, Fulwider accepted a teaching position at the School of Fine Arts at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 1942 Fulwider became Supervisor of the Art Department in Technical Publications for the U. S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Fields in Dayton, Ohio. At the end of the war, Fulwider returned to the John Herron Art School as a faculty member. He taught there for two years (1945 -1947), before accepting a teaching position at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle, Washington. He retained his post at Cornish from 1947 to 1949, before deciding to return to Miami University as a full Professor where he taught until his retirement in 1973 (chairing the Art Department from 1963-1968). Many of his works expressed his long-held interest in industrial images, landscapes, and railroad scenes of the Pacific Northwest. Fulwider received over 22 awards throughout his career, and exhibited at numerous museums around the United States, including the Butler Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, Cincinnati Art Museum, Dayton Art Institute, Speed Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Library of Congress, and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art. Upon retirement, he moved his studio to northern Idaho, where he’d spent his previous 26 summers. He eventually moved to Arizona in 1992 where he remained active until his death in 2003.
