Background
James Lee Byars was born on April 10, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
James Lee Byars was born on April 10, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
James studied art and philosophy at Wayne State University, graduating in 1955.
After studying art and philosophy, Byars moved to Kyoto in 1958, where he spent much of the next decade. Influenced by aspects of Japanese Noh theater and Shinto rituals, Byars created and performed folded paper works at sites including Japanese temples and New York galleries, and made fabric pieces that served as costumes to join together two or more people in public performances.
During his career, he also produced a lot of printed books, ephemera and correspondence that he distributed among friends and acquaintances. Dispersed across a wide geography, they attest to Byars’s desire to be present — however fleetingly — in different places and times.
Byars lived and worked itinerantly, moving between New York, Venice, San Francisco, Kyoto, Bern, the Swiss Alps, Los Angeles and the American southwest.
Posing his art confoundingly between apparent contradictions — the monumental and the miniscule, the universal and the personal, the luxurious and the minimal, the relic and the event, the spectacular and the invisible — Byars heightens the viewing experience. In the aesthetic interrogations he provokes, he suggests that perfection may occur not simply at the most evanescent edges of form, but also in the attenuated moments of attention spent trying to discern it.
The Museum of Modern Art played an important role in Byars’s early career. In 1958, after having been inspired by a Mark Rothko painting he encountered in his native Detroit, Byars came to New York and arrived unannounced at MoMA’s reception desk intent on getting an introduction to Rothko. Instead, he met Dorothy C. Miller, the museum’s first Curator of Painting and Sculpture, who took an interest in the paper works Byars had been producing in Japan. Byars convinced her to allow him to mount a brief exhibition in one of the museum’s stairwells. This event would be remembered as the artist’s first museum exhibition, and the relationship between Byars and Miller flourished into an extensive correspondence and gifts to the museum of a number of key performable paper works, which are included in the exhibition.
The artist's works were shown at many exhibitions in New York, Munich, Amsterdam, Boston and other cities.
The World Flag
Untitled (Tantric Figure)
Letter to Mrs. de Menil
The Golden Box for Speaking
Eight Cones
Untitled (A Face)
The Perfect Thought
The Golden Tower
See It Is The Gift
Concave figure
Untitled
Pink Silk Object
The Death of James Lee Byars
Is
The Angel
The Human Figure
The Giant
Dress for Five Persons
The Capital of the Golden Tower
The Eros
Mask for Two Persons
The Rose Table of Perfect
Untitled Object
The Philosophical Nail
Byars was convinced, that one can find perfection both at the most evanescent edges of form and in the acute moments of attention spent trying to discern it.
In many ways, Mr. Byars's best work may have been himself. A tall man with an aristocratic bearing and a succession of skilled tailors, he always seemed to be performing, usually appearing in one of his distinctive suits of red or black silk, black velvet, gold lame or white linen. Even when exhibiting installations involving furniture or his simple Minimal cubes and spheres carved in stone, he would frequently inhabit the display, sitting motionless as if he, too, was a sculpture.
James was married to Gwedolyn F. Dunaway.