OLD LYME, CONN.- The Lyme Academy of Fine Arts announced the arrival of internationally-renowned sculptor Chad Fisher as the new Charlotte Colby Danly Sculpture Chair. This appointment marks a bold step in the Lyme Academy’s move to build the premier figurative sculpting program in the United States. Set to launch in Fall 2023, this multi-year, intensive program further expands the breadth of the Academy’s rich fine arts curriculum, while deepening its commitment to its mission.

“I am beyond thrilled and honored to be the incoming Sculpture Chair at Lyme Academy,” says Fisher. “To teach is to provide students with a space to grow emotionally, intellectually, and experientially. As an art educator, I am here to help amplify each student’s dream through a very human and personal experience, and to provide the tools that are necessary for them to grow expansively, both artistically and professionally.”

Fisher’s own work is informed by a decade of rigorous academic training, including a long-term apprenticeship with Gary Weisman, a respect for art’s lineage, and a comprehensive understanding of rediscovered historic design principles, many based in the 19th-century Parisian figurative arts tradition. In 2017, Fisher, along with his father and wife, built a personal bronze foundry in Pennsylvania. Fisher Sculpture has since received commissions from the Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Bears Football Club, and the Philadelphia 76ers, and has produced bronze and stone works for numerous military memorials nationwide.

Fisher’s experience and dynamic plan for the new sculpture program honor the vision of Lyme Academy’s founder, the celebrated sculptor Elisabeth Gordon Chandler (d. 2006). The Chandler Studio, the future home of Fisher’s classes, with its dramatic skylights, north-light windows, 18-foot ceilings, and 1600 square feet of work space, is one of many state-of-the-art studios on the Academy’s idyllic four-acre campus.

The Chair Fisher fills is the creation of Lyme Academy alumna Charlotte Colby Danly, who generously donated $1 million to help others learn sculpting in the figurative tradition, as she herself did under the tutelage of Elisabeth Chandler. Danly’s support of the Academy is inspired in part by the commitment and quality of its current, thriving student body, and the significant place the school holds in a landscape long renowned as a center for the arts.

Danly’s philanthropic act has been complemented in 2022 by two major contributions to the Academy’s holdings: in May, the gift of the Karlheinz Kronberger Collection of 19th-Century French Bronzes, numbering well over 200 museum-quality objects, and, more recently, the long-term loan of 28 plaster casts from the National Academy of Design in New York. Both will provide students with an inspiring study collection, unmatched in any teaching institution in the United States. Along with Fisher’s much-anticipated classes, they serve to confirm Lyme Academy’s status as a destination site for the next generation of figurative artists.