Sculptor Craig Frederick ’81 is asked if he can ever shut off his brain. “The answer is a flat-out no,” he says. 

Craig grew up in New Britain, Conn., on a cul-de-sac with a brook across the street, where he spent many hours as a youth. He says he sensed he was different. 

“I felt safe at home, I felt safe at the brook, and I felt safe in art classes,” Craig says. “Other than that, I was pretty freaked out.” Years later he was diagnosed with severe clinical depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he says.  

Today Craig says he is happy and healthy. He is a professor at Central Connecticut State University whose art works are in private, corporate, and public collections in many states and countries. His pieces range in size from maquettes, which are small-scale models or sketches of sculptures, to a monumental piece such as “Home,” which he made 25 years ago for the city of New Britain. He has worked with many materials, from black walnut to pink alabaster and white marble, from bronze to stainless steel. He carves, casts, fabricates, welds. 

“The brook was my first school,” Craig says. “I was into geology at a young age and obsessed with form as early as I could remember.” He says his father worked much more than a 40-hour week but would take a few days in the summer to bring the family to North Truro, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “We’d be walking the flats off Provincetown,” he remembers of the shallow water, “and [my family] would have to pull me off them. I was so obsessed with the patterns and ripples. They fascinated me. And I would get in the brook at home — to this day I remember it — at eye level so I could watch how the water curled over the top of a rock from surface tension.” He also was fascinated by what grew along the brook and why. “I was someone who cared deeply about the ways of things, the interconnectivity of everything,” he says. 

During his three years at Loomis Chaffee, Craig says, he spent most of his creative energy on music, not art. After graduating, he “found his way to Skidmore College. Then it was, ‘What am I going to do?’” he says. In the fall of his freshman year, a friend showed him a soapstone carving from a 3D design class. Craig, fascinated, went to the local art supply store so he could buy tools and material to do his own carving in his room. Another friend saw the piece Craig carved and told him he had to meet the sculpture professor, John Cunningham. “A remarkable professor and influence in my life,” Craig says. Mr. Cunningham taught for 50 years at Skidmore. Craig received a bachelor’s degree in geology/biology with a concentration in sculpture from Skidmore in 1985.  

Mr. Cunningham suggested Craig go to grad school for sculpture, but coming from a blue-collar family, art did not seem to be a realistic career path. So Craig left New Britain for Denver, thinking he might pursue landscape architecture, but that didn’t happen. He had been a teacher’s assistant in his final two years at Skidmore, and coming from a prep school background, he thought he’d like to teach. He did that for three years at a private school in San Antonio. Grad school — at the University of Pennsylvania — eventually came along.  

“When I got accepted,” he continued, “that summer I went to New York City alone and scoured galleries and museums. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is where being on the spectrum helped me out.” He said he learned art history in a few months compared to what most people might learn in a few years. “I have hyperfocus,” he says. “When I am into something — to this day I haven't forgotten a word spoken to me in grad school, but I can read a book right now and get to the 20th page and not remember the characters that were mentioned in the first chapter. So finding myself was a matter of finding my talents, and fate.”   

Craig earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture in 1992 from Penn, learning from renowned sculptors Bob Engman, the director of the graduate studies program; and Maury Lowe. He sold his first piece right out of grad school, a fabricated bronze sculpture purchased by the president’s office of the Shell Oil Corporation for Petrolios Mexicanos, Mexico’s state-owned oil company.   

The Penn program spanned three years. Artists were given studio space. There were two critiques a year, Craig says, by “heavy-hitting artists from all over the world, and you had to defend your work. Brilliant program. I had sculptures I had made at Skidmore, and they were promising, but Engman basically went on John Cunningham’s recommendation.” 

The kid who was fascinated by those ripples in the water had made ripples of his own in the arts community. He has had more than three dozen solo or group exhibitions and many commissioned pieces. He has taught in multiple places, including his current stint at Central Connecticut. He was a founder of the Greater New Britain Arts Alliance and served as its first elected president. The New Britain Museum of American Art celebrated the 25th anniversary of his public sculpture, “Home,” in October. Craig has lived back in his hometown since 1994. 

Tim O’Brien, a former mayor of New Britain and state representative, was on the selection committee to choose the sculpture.   

“As a large work of art in the heart of the city, we, on the committee, understood the high profile it would have, and we took the selection very seriously,” Mr. O’Brien says on Craig’s website, craigfrederick.com.  

"Home" captured the committee’s vision, according to the comment from Mr. O’Brien. “This work shows the deep passion for our city that its creator, Craig Frederick, has as a New Britain native. It is a strong and solid work, yet formed into graceful arches, symbolizing the strength and creativity of our city's people.” 

Strength and creativity are at Craig’s core. He is open about his emotional struggles — it was hell at times, he says — but today he “is very happy. ... I never thought happiness was a real thing.”   

He’s asked if he would change his life if he could go back. “I wouldn't change a damn thing,” he says. “I’ve reflected on this deeply. I can’t explain how much pain there was.” When he was officially diagnosed with severe clinical depression at the age of 31, the doctor told him, “It’s amazing that you are alive. You need to feel really good about having had that strength.” More than 10 years later he officially was diagnosed with ADHD. He takes medication for depression but no longer does for ADHD, saying he “stopped after developing my own work-arounds that help me navigate it well.” 

He reflected on his journey, the highs and the lows, when he gave a keynote speech recently at the Connecticut Art Education Association (CAEA) fall conference. The CAEA promotes visual arts education for all K–12 students. Craig says he told the teachers gathered, “You’re my heroes. You all saved me. You need to know that you know of some kids you saved, but there are far more you don’t know. ... They needed you like they needed water and needed air.” 

He thinks of all the teachers who changed his life, from Mr. Cunningham to Mr. Engman and Mr. Lowe and many Loomis Chaffee educators, including former philosophy teacher Dom Failla, who Craig says made him a better thinker; former English teacher James Rugen ’70, who Craig says made him a better reader and writer; and former history and economics teacher James “Grim” Wilson, his dorm head in Flagg Hall, who Craig says was compassionate and non-judgmental. 

“My life could have gone so many other ways, so how could I not teach?” Craig says. “I feel a responsibility in that I have these gifts, I can do some pretty amazing things with them, and I experience amazing effects from those gifts. How could I not teach that?”  

He also says teaching can be “nothing shy of thrilling” when he awakens in someone the desire to take the time to really look and see. Too often, he says, “our visual acuity is on break, atrophied, but the good news is that it can be awakened.” And whether someone becomes an artist or not, he says, taking the time to look and see will change their life. During this interview, as we sit outside The Bean, a Windsor center coffee shop, Craig pauses in the middle of an answer. “Sorry,” he says. “I was distracted by the reflection of the plane. It was so beautiful in the window.” 

He is proud to be an artist.  

“Artists are very sensitive. That's how they became artists,” Craig says. “We were all called too sensitive, but there is no such thing. We see everything. In a free world, we react creatively. We obsess, we consider, and we react creatively. That is why oppressive governments jail us because we are dangerous. We make people think.” 

Artists, he says, are cultural neurons. “They see beauty on a level, and they want to share, and they also see what is going really bad before anyone else, and they yell and scream about it,” Craig says. “They are as important as any profession. Art is the purest form of documenting a culture collectively. The first thing we look at when studying ancient cultures is art and architecture.” 

Craig exhibited in Loomis’ Richmond Art Center in 1992. In June Craig plans to be back on campus for his 45th reunion.  

He has carved out quite a career, and his brain has not shut off. He says he follows cutting-edge physics because that informs his work. He is interested in digital sculpture and 3D printing.  

“The juice for me is the hyperfocus,” he says. “It takes me to a place where I can’t hear anything else, I can’t see anything else. My wife has learned when she comes up, she will very quietly say “I’m coming in and you need to eat.’ I can go hours without eating or drinking anything. That place I go to, the only thing I've read is it is like where master meditators go. I used to think this was hokey, too, where the portal of the universe opens up and you start to understand and you start to get secrets. That happens to me in the hyperfocus of my work, and that is the juice that keeps me coming back. And a very important point I make to my students is, ‘That thing you just made, that thing I made, is not art, it is a work of art. Art is a much bigger thing. It is your life when you are compelled [to create].” 

That irresistible force, that internal urge, lives inside Craig and emerges through his hands, eyes, and mind. He is compelled.