Fred Eversley, Light and Space Sculptor Who Left an Engineering Job to Pursue Art, Dies at 83

Fred Eversley, a sculptor who spun his scientific training into art, died in New York on March 14 at 83. A spokesperson for David Kordansky Gallery, which became the first gallery to represent him in 2018, confirmed his passing, saying that he died unexpectedly following a brief illness.

Eversley is most often associated with the Light and Space movement, a loose group of sculptors who rose to fame in California during the 1970s. Like his colleagues De Wain Valentine and Larry Bell, he sculpted sleek abstractions from industrial materials.

But whereas these artists focused in their work on perception and transcendence, Eversley became an artist after leaving his engineering job at Wyle Laboratories, which provided services to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and he was engaged in a different project. “Spiritual is a funny word,” Eversley told Art in America in 2024, responding to a recurring accounts from critics who have described otherworldly encounters his work. “I don’t really talk that way.”

Instead, he was more interested in portraying scientific subjects: black holes, dead star matter, and parabolas, whose arc-like forms generated a career-long inquiry for him, in particular.

Parabolas occur throughout nature, and Eversley began sculpting them in 1970, not long after he left Wyle Laboratories, where he had been the youngest engineer working on the Apollo Program. He started out modest, making smallish resin sculptures that could rest on a pedestal. Cast in shades of blue and purple, these sculptures evince a high-gloss Finish Fetish aesthetic that was pervasive in Los Angeles during its era. But even despite their lush surfaces, Eversley’s sculptures stand apart from nearly all other Finish Fetish art because of their scientific underpinning.

By the end of his career, Eversley had begun scaling up his creations, with one of the largest, a 12-foot-tall resin sculpture, being staged in 2023 in New York, where he relocated permanently four years earlier. Titled Parabolic Light, it was a transparent structure that rose tall from a pedestal near Central Park, its magenta tones setting it apart from the greenery all around.

Eversley recently completed an even larger commission: a sculpture installed in a fountain in West Palm Beach, Florida. Composed of eight cylindrical forms that shoot 17 feet into the air, it will pay homage to the columns of the nearby First Church of Christ, Scientist, which was designed by the African American architect Julian Abele. Because of the climate in Florida, Eversley could not fabricate the piece with his typical resin, but he embraced the challenge. “My future is stainless steel,” he told Art in America, beginning to smile.

Frederick Eversley was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a Barbadian by birth, was an aerospace engineer; his mother worked as a teacher and headed up the PTA. Eversley gravitated early on toward the forms he would call art. Inspired by an article on Isaac Newton that appeared in Popular Mechanics, a teenage Eversley went to his father’s basement lab, placed a pie pan loaded with Jell-O on a turntable, and let the record player spin. A parabolic depression resulted, paving the way for many sculptures to follow.

But at the time, Eversley was not aware that that this was a creative act—he thought he was mainly fulfilling a science experiment. Still, the gesture made a lasting mark. “My commitment and focus over all these years stems from my belief that energy is the source of everything in the world,” he told Artforum in 2022. “Nothing exists without energy. It’s the most essential concept for the basis of all life. So I just tried to push that idea as far as I can.”

He attended Carnegie Mellon, where he studied electrical engineering, not art, and became the only Black student in that program. In 1963, connections through a fraternity helped him get his Wyle job, where he would ultimately work on the Apollo missions.

In California, Eversley continued to face racism—a landlord refused to rent him an apartment because he was Black. He eventually found a home in Venice Beach, the city where he spent much of his career. His race would later set him apart from his future Light and Space colleagues, all of whom were white.

But his time in California during the ’60s also ended up being fruitful. Even before becoming an artist, he was able to provide technical advice to artists such as Larry Bell, who would ultimately become his peer.

Eversley’s career path changed in 1967, when his car went over a cliff while he was driving home from work late one night. He broke his femur and was forced to walk with crutches for 13 months, requiring him to take time off from his job. While on medical leave, he began playing around with polyester resin in the loft of artist Charles Mattox, whose supply of colored pigments Eversley would ultimately use in these early pieces.

He began to consider himself an artist and, in 1969, took over the studio of his mentor John Altoon, who died that year. A breakthrough came that year, when Eversley used a potter’s wheel belonging to De Wain Valentine’s wife, Kiana, to make his sculptures, using a mold instead of his hands to form the parabolas.

Early on, critics, artists, and dealers took an interest in Eversley. At Robert Rauschenberg’s behest, Eversley began making inroads with New York dealers—Leo Castelli was one such connection, and though he never offered Eversley a show, he did end up saving Eversley from drowning after Rauschenberg pushed the injured artist into a pool. The well-known galleries Phyllis Kind and OK Harris also showed his art; dealer Betty Parsons was among the first to buy one his sculptures. Marcia Tucker, then a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, gave him his first museum show in 1970.

But he did not official gallery representation until 2018, the year he signed with David Kordansky. Asked why by critic Linda Yablonsky in 2023, Eversley uttered just one word: “Discrimination.”

During the ’70s, critics and artists were divided on the merits of his art. One Artforum reviewer in 1970 dismissed a lens-shaped sculpture as “an enormous costume jewel, but at least it submits whole-heartedly to loveliness.”

Meanwhile, Black artists were at the time engaged in the project of defining a Black aesthetic, which some claimed ought to be overtly political. Eversley did not explicitly comment on the issues of his day, writing in one 1978 statement that he was focused on “perceiving the complex nature of reality, both physical and social, and through these perceptions, forming new kinds of subjective meanings.” While this may have once made Eversley’s work to be divisive for some, its expansive quality led art historian Darby English to praise the artist in 2016 for his ability to “pierce the conceptual bubble the black artist was meant to fortify.”

His work’s expansiveness may also be one reason it has appeared in so many contexts. It has been shown in art museums and airports, with his public sculpture outside Miami International Airport counting among the pieces by him most beloved by the public. It has been featured in surveys about Minimalism, Californian art history, art in the age of Black Power, and and art-and-science crossovers in the past two decades alone. The Orange County Museum of Art mounted a survey of his 1970s sculptures in 2022, an homage to the institution’s 1976 solo for the artist.

Yet he seemed unbothered by his recent art-world success, maintaining a modest existence with his wife Maria Larsson at his New York studio. Up until the very end, he continued exploring the very same themes he always had. “The sculpture has to attract the viewer, from a distance, in order for them to want to start exploring its inner dimensions and move around the work,” he said in a 2023 Brooklyn Rail interview. “They should be compelled enough by what they see to want to get closer and discover more.”