Paul Fisher is an art dealer and owner of the Paul Fisher Gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida, established in 1990. In the mid-1980’s he met Dale Chihuly and traveled with him around the world, selling his work and consulting on major projects. In the early 1990’s Paul continued to travel globally in the service of art, including as a cultural attaché for the U.S. Information Agency. Paul has collaborated on hundreds of exhibitions, private sales and media events over the past thirty years.
Paul was instrumental in bringing to the 2016 Craft Show the Chihuly Macchia installation, courtesy of Arthur and Paulette Wiener, founders of the Wiener Museum of Decorative Arts. Dale Chihuly was named the Smithsonian Visionary Artist in that year. Paul gave a lecture on Chihuly at the Craft Show, providing many personal anecdotes about his time with the artist.
Paul is also the Founder and CEO of Juried Art Services, the premier service of its kind to manage the call to artists, application, jurying, and notification processes for hundreds of museums and art organizations. Juried Art Services grew out of a multi-year collaboration between Paul and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee (SWC) to automate the selection process. Until 2002, collecting applications and managing the jurying of Craft Show artists was run entirely by the SWC in a laborious, manual process. In 2002 the SWC was the first organization to use what is now a patented Juried Art Services technology allowing jurors to view artists’ images remotely and reduce the pool of applicants from over 1,000 artists to about 350 before coming together to make their final selections. The automation and digitization of the application and jurying process have been an incredible boon to the SWC and the Craft Show, lightening our workload enormously and enhancing our ability to support our mission of raising funds for grants to the Smithsonian. Paul attends both the jurying and the Craft Show each year and continues to be a valuable resource to SWC members in terms of suggesting potential jurors and discussing trends in the craft world.