Alabama Artist Frank Fleming Dies at 77

BIRMINGHAM, Al - Alabama artist and sculptor Frank Fleming died Sunday at the age of 77. Fleming, known throughout the country in art circles for his work, is best known in Birmingham for creating the Storyteller Fountain in Five Points South.

According to Fleming's obituary from Alabama Media Group, Fleming grew up on a farm in rural Bear Creek during the 1940's and was immersed in nature at a very early age. Having a speech impediment as a child, he chose not to speak until he was about 8-years-old, instead building a close bond with nature, his family said. That unique connection with the natural world remained an important creative force throughout Fleming's art and life.

Upon graduating from the University of North Alabama in Florence, Fleming worked at Boeing/NASA as a technical illustrator before attending graduate school in ceramics at The University of Alabama.

In 1983, Birmingham art dealer and anthropologist specializing in pre-Columbian art Malcolm McRae was murdered. McRae was known in the Southside community for his home that he transformed into an art gallery by day. He was listed as a missing person for six weeks, until his body was found in the woods of Helena.

McRae's mother, Jane, commissioned Fleming to make a piece of art in Southside in honor of her son. What Mrs. McRae envisioned as a tile rim around the garden in Five Points South quickly transformed, with the help of Cecil Roberts and Mayor Richard Arrington Jr.'s aide Anne Adams, into the Storyteller Fountain. Gerald Wayne Lawley, 31 at the time, was convicted in 1984 of killing McRae.

The final fountain wasn't installed until 1992. There was a grassroots effort to raise money for the fountain. Eventually enough money was raised, and the statues were cast in bronze and then installed in Five Points South. Fleming originally planned for the Storyteller in the fountain to be a lion, representing McRae. He later changed his mind and made the sculpture into a ram.

Fleming's funeral arrangements have not been announced.

Photo by Michael Seale/Patch