Bob Fleming
American
Born: Buffalo, New York, USA
Bob Fleming is a visual artist. His practice includes painting, printmaking and other media – including film. He received his BA from Cornell University in 1972, where he also played on the Cornell football team. Following his graduation, Fleming worked as a painter and printmaker, which was and is his primary passion. He then attended the University of Buffalo Law School and graduated cum laude in 1978. Soon after, he began work as a confidential law clerk to John T. Curtin, Chief Judge of the Federal District Court, where he worked on the momentous Buffalo school desegregation case. After two years in Federal Court, Fleming joined the Hodgson Russ law firm. At Hodgson, he practiced Corporate and Antitrust Law and served as head of the firm’s corporate department and on the board of the largest law firm in Buffalo. He has been included in Best Lawyers of America for both corporate and antitrust law for over 20 years and was named the corporate lawyer of the year in Buffalo in 2008.
Fleming is a co-founder of Mirabo Press, a printmaking studio in Buffalo, New York that collaborates with regional and national artists, and also offers various workshops and community programming.
Fleming believes that “the imaginative possibilities of responding to the world are vast. No two people - let alone artists - are affected in the same way.” His work, which has tended toward the representational and figurative, is a reaction to living in an era that always seems to de-prioritize our shared humanity. The images come from observing and absorbing material elements in both my small, personal universe and in the wider world, including, consciously or not, the omnipresent media. “There is no intentionally specific, or direct meaning to my work” Fleming stated, “nonetheless, in the relationship of the art work to the viewer/viewing field, it is anticipated, or at least hoped, that a viewer may confront the question of what kind of world she lives in and makes.”
The themes Fleming is typically interested in are the sense that people are off balance (off kilter) in their lives; the difficulty of meaningful and sustained personal interconnections; the human disruptions caused by economic and other crises; and the cost of violence and the myth of the “good war.” [1]
An exhibition of his recent prints was held at Western New York Book Arts Center, Buffalo New York, in 2018.
Fleming have served as director of numerous for-profit and not-for-profit companies and currently as a director of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Western New York and also Western NY Book Arts.