Background
Byars, Mel was born on September 1, 1938 in Columbia, South Carolina, United States. Son of Melvin Mark Byars and Annie Lee Selby.
Byars, Mel was born on September 1, 1938 in Columbia, South Carolina, United States. Son of Melvin Mark Byars and Annie Lee Selby.
Byars studied journalism in the 1950s at the University of South Carolina. In the early 1980s, he studied anthropology under Stanley Diamond (1921–1991) in the master’s-degree program of The New School for Social Research.
And, previously there, he was enrolled in the School of Media Studies. A decade later, he turned to the history of applied art/industrial design and served as the archivist of the Thérèse Bonney Photography Collection (images of 1925-1935 French decorative arts and other subjects) in New York"s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and has been a major donor of 20th-century objects to the museum’s permanent collection. He has made other donations to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Uměleckoprůmyslová museum v Praze) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Byars has taught at Pratt Institute and Fashion Institute of Technology (Fashion Institute Of Technology) in New York City and at others as well as lectured widely while remaining active in the advertising sector.
In addition to The Design Encyclopedia, other literary works include more than a dozen books, essays for various design-exhibition catalogs, book introductions and articles for I.D., Clear, Graphis, Metropolitan Home, Blueprint, and other magazines. A number of the books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese.