Renowned Alabama artist Fred Nall Hollis dies at 76

Fred Nall Hollis, an award-winning, world renowned Alabama visual artist, died on Saturday, according to a local arts center. He was 76.

Born in Troy, Alabama, Hollis worked in a variety of genre-bending mediums, including porcelain, carpet, mosaics, sculpture and etchings. The prolific artist was featured in over 300 one-man shows and showed his work across the world, including in the United States, France and Italy, according to the Nature Art and Life League Art Association, a foundation that Hollis established.

Under the professional name “Nall,” the artist worked under the tutelage of Salvadore Dali in the early 1970s, according to the association’s website.

Hollis went into hospice last week and died on Saturday, said Pelham Pearce, executive director of the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope, Alabama, where Hollis lived.

“The artist Nall once said that as his memories began to fade, his work brought him ‘back to the eras and locations of his past,’” the center said in an Instagram post. “Today, the Eastern Shore, the state of Alabama, and all of the ‘locations of his past’ say goodbye to a visionary.”

Hollis operated the Nall Studio Museum in Fairhope at the time of his death.

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Over the course of his career, he showed work in places including the Menton Museum of Art in France and the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy, according to his association’s website.

Hollis was awarded the state’s highest humanities honor in 2018, when he was named the humanities fellow for the Alabama Humanities Alliance. He was inducted into the Alabama Center for the Arts Hall of Fame in 2016.

Two of his works are on permanent display at the NALL Museum in the International Arts Center at Troy University. The school awarded him an honorary doctoral degree in 2001.

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Riddle is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.