A fountain of life

Frank Fleming keeps an eye on his fountain.

The renowned sculptor is not driving much anymore, but when he’s headed down 20th Street, he’ll glance to the right to be sure that Five Points South’s “Storyteller fountain”  — one of the most iconic pieces of art in Birmingham — is in good shape. He’s allowed, because he created it.

“I do usually look at it, but not in a braggadocios sort of way,” said Fleming, 70, who lives just up the street on the portion of 21st Avenue South known as Diaper Row. “I like to see if it’s clean and see if all of the frogs are spraying water.”

The Storyteller, in which a ram-headed figure is reading to a flock of different kinds of animals, is the sculptor’s best-known work, something that he couldn’t have even dreamed of as a child in Bear Creek, a small community in northwest Alabama.

 There, the young boy grew up battling a speech impediment that left him virtually a mute.

“I wasn’t able to verbalize,” Fleming said. “I could talk to the animals, and I could sing, but I couldn’t talk to humans, including my family. I had a severe block.”

But then he went to Florence State University, now the University of North Alabama, where he received four successful years of speech therapy and, much to the farm-boy’s surprise, learned he had a knack for art.

“I was going to major in biology, but I inadvertently took an art course and found that I had some talent,” Fleming said.

The artist ended up minoring in biology, but his artistic side took over. Since 1972 — after stints as an art teacher in Huntsville schools, graphic artist at Hayes Aircraft in Birmingham and NASA in Huntsville, and two graduate art degrees at the University of Alabama — Fleming has been working in Birmingham, establishing a worldwide reputation with his often whimsical ceramics and sculptures.

“I deal with animal imagery, with plant life and with my surroundings, what I grew up with and what I know,” Fleming said. “That’s pretty much how I would describe my art.”

Fleming was successful even before “the fountain.” He’s had more than 85 one-man shows and countless group shows around the country. He’s had pieces on display at (and bought by) the Smithsonian Institution and other prestigious galleries, and he’s always at work on commissions small and large.

But it was the 1983 murder of Birmingham art dealer Malcolm McRae, a good friend of Fleming’s, that led to what the artist acknowledges he is best known for, the sculpture at Five Points South.

“His mother had some memorial money and wanted me to do a tile lip around the fountain,” Fleming said. “But the city got involved and said let’s do something a little more elaborate.”

It was installed in 1992.

“It turned into what I called ‘The Storyteller,’” Fleming said. “The ram man is reading a book to all these animals. It’s a peaceable kingdom, with the lion, deer, turtle, rabbit. Some of them don’t get along in real life, but they do in my sculpture.”

Philip Morris, an expert on Birmingham architecture and former executive editor of Southern Living, said with “The Storyteller” and other works, Fleming “has created a lasting place for himself in the civic realm as well as for private collectors.”

“I think ‘The Storyteller’ has become a much-loved civic landmark,” Morris said. “You see children enjoying it today, and that’s always a good sign.”

“The Storyteller” was not without controversy. Some said the goat-headed man, just steps away from Highlands United Methodist Church, was a Satanic symbol.

“It really did bother me at first, because there was so much innocence in the sculpture,” said Fleming, who says he is a religious man. “But had they said nothing, no one would have really realized the fountain was there. … The controversy led to unbelievable publicity, and people started collecting my work more and more.”

Following a Fleming exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art last year, the artist all but disappeared, battling sepsis, which he said started with a spider bite. He spent six months in Huntsville in treatment and rehabilitation, and he said he came near death.

“Until the second week of December [2015], I hadn’t worked since last May [2015],” Fleming said. “I had a lot of catching up to do.”

Working every weekday, Fleming’s projects include an outdoor chess set commissioned in Shelby County and a project at “an exclusive beach community.” He has any number of commissions at any one time.

Some of those pieces mean more to Fleming than the famous works he’s constructed in Birmingham and elsewhere. Get more information on them at frankflemingart.com.

“I’ve got work in quite a few places, and it does mean a lot to me, but it becomes just another piece of work,” Fleming said. “I don’t get hung up on the importance of my pieces of work. A little piece I can hold in my hand can be as important as that Five Points fountain.”

In the end, Fleming just likes making art.

“I still enjoy working very, very much,” he said. “It’s what I am, who I am, and how I am.”