Fred B. Brian was born in Normal, Illinois in 1924; he was raised in Bloomington, Illinois, and in during the summers in the Ottawa National Forest in Gogebic County, Michigan. Fred’s parents had begun spending summers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1916, and in 1923 they purchased land and built a log house on Lake Gogebic. Throughout his adult life, Fred spent summers at the lake with his wife and two daughters. The house is still in the family and is being enjoyed now by the fifth generation of Brians. Much of the area is still a wilderness, with thousands of square miles of pine and hardwood forests and impenetrable tamarack and tag alder swamps.

After serving in World War II as a pilot, Fred began studying printmaking; in 1950 he enrolled in the University of Iowa, where he studied the craft with Mauricio Lasansky and James Lechay. He began teaching painting, printmaking and art history at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1952, and spent his entire career there until his retirement in 1984. He was voted “Distinguished Teacher of the Year” in 1979, and in 2000 the University hosted an emeritus exhibit of work produced during his retirement years, which ended too soon with his death in October 1999.

Even Fred’s closest friends in the art school were not aware of his prolific output: in addition to annual faculty shows at Illinois Wesleyan University, Fred exhibited in nearly 150 regional, national and international shows during his 32-year tenure. The roster of venues includes New York’s National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago. He received awards at many juried exhibitions and has work in 19 public collections in the U.S. and Canada, including 11 universities and the U.S. Foreign Service in Washington, DC.