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That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald is the first major publication devoted to artist Russell FitzGerald. Bringing together newly commissioned scholarship and more than 90 reproductions of paintings, drawings, illustrations, archival material the book offers the first comprehensive account of an artist whose ambitious vision has remained hidden for decades.

Russell FitzGerald (1932–1978) was a visionary artist and illustrator (notably for his friend Samuel R. Delany’s sci-fi novels) who worked in 1950s San Francisco, 1960s New York, and 1970s Vancouver. Rejecting the dominance of modernism, FitzGerald pursued a deeply personal figurative art grounded in America’s fraught history of racism, religious pictorial traditions, and literature, myth, and occult practices (beyond his relationship with poet Jack Spicer, FitzGerald is best known for his Tarot deck). Long overlooked, FitzGerald’s queer artistic vision grew from his unique spiritual cosmology based in his attraction to blackness and Black men. Edited by Canadian art historian and curator Jon Davies, this handsome volume brings together reproductions of the artist’s work and other material with new texts by Davies, Dodie Bellamy, and Jamie Parra to return FitzGerald to art history and consider his relevance to the present.

Contributors

1. Jon Davies

   is a curator, writer, and art historian based in Montreal, Canada. From 2004 to 2016, he worked as a contemporary art and film/video curator in Toronto, including at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Oakville Galleries. His book on Paul Morrissey’s 1970 film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009, and his edited anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021. He co-curated the 68th Flaherty Film Seminar, Queer World-Mending, with artist Steve Reinke and was the General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada (2024–25). He received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University in 2023.

2. Dodie Bellamy

   is a writer based in San Francisco, California. Her books include Bee Reaved (2021) and When the Sick Rule the World (2015), both published by Semiotext(e). She has contributed essays and criticism to numerous art publications and journals, including Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Apartamento, diaphanes, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. With her late husband, Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 (2017). Bellamy was the subject of the CCA Wattis Institute’s 2018–19 On Our Mind program, which culminated in the 2020 monograph Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction in 2023.

3. Jamie Parra

   is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in J19, American Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Leviathan. He is currently completing Shadow and Line: Slavery and the Forms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, a book examining race, aesthetics, and the idea of art in the nineteenth century. He previously held a C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the American Studies Program at Williams College and received his PhD from Columbia University.

This publication would not have been possible without the financial support of the William A. Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies and the Canada Council for the Arts. An important additional thank you the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery for their encouragement and support for this project.

1. That Directionless Light of the Future
   $45

   The first major publication devoted to Russell FitzGerald (1932–1978), a remarkable yet largely forgotten American Canadian artist. Moving from San Francisco’s Beat generation to New York’s experimental literary scene and finally Vancouver, FitzGerald forged an intensely personal art shaped by Christian mysticism, Tarot, mythology, science fiction, and queer desire. His allegorical paintings confront race, sexuality, faith, and redemption with unresolved contradictions.

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