Alan J. Shields (February 4, 1944 – December 13, 2005)[1] was an American painter, and for a time during the 1980s, had a secondary career as a commercial boat operator, including as ferryboat captain.

Shields was born in Herington, Kansas to a farming family—his great-grandfather had been a cattle farmer who had been a homesteader on the Great Plains.

He grew up watching his mother and two younger sisters quilting and embroidering, living on a farm required a degree of frugality and recycling, which is where Shields learned the crafts himself.

[4] He did not give up his SoHo loft until the mid-1980s, at which point he decided to raise his family, grow his own food, become a commercial fisherman and a licensed ferryboat captain.

He would go on to get a one-hundred ton boating license and become a captain for the North Ferry Company, connecting Shelter Island and Greenport, New York.

[4] After becoming a ferryboat captain and pursuing an additional career as a commercial fisherman, Shields' passion for fishing began to have a dialectic relationship with his artmaking.

[9] The work, which is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, refers to the "countercultural aesthetics of the time from tie-dye to love beads.

Throughout his life, Shields exhibited in commercial gallery spaces throughout the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia.

[8] In 2016, another survey show of his work, Alan Shields: Protracted Simplicity (1966-1985), was held at the Aspen Art Museum.

[8] More recent exhibitions have been held at the Shelter Island Historical Society,[18] Alan Shields: Where Art Life Met Island Life, at Pace Prints, New York,[19] (both in 2017) and at Goya Contemporary in Baltimore, Alan Shields: Of His Time and Ahead OF His Time, in 2022.