(1959 - present)
John Eric Byers creates unique wooden furniture pieces that stive for a perfect balance of form, texture, structure, and function. Inspired by geometry and the purity of his materials, John has been honing his technique and his style for nearly four decades and produces individually hand-made pieces that are minimal and modern, yet emotional and refined.
Trained at Wendell Castle’s school in the 1980s, Byers’ inspirations come from some of the leading names in American design – the architects Frank Loyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, craftsmen like
George Nakashima, the sculptor Donald Judd, and furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson.
Like those masters, Byers is attempting to break down the boundaries of his chosen medium and overcome his own physical limitations as well as those inherent in working with wood. As he himself says, he approaches each project “by embracing the realities and limitations of my body, my craft, my materials, and using those limitations to navigate to the ideal outcome.”
Byers works largely alone, and his art is very much a personal expression. His designs are stripped down to their simplest form while expressing the beauty of the materials he uses and maximising the function of the finished piece. Yet, their exteriors belie the work and skill that goes into crafting them. As Ursula Ilse Neuman of the Museum of Arts and Design notes: "Like any master, Byers' hides his painstaking labor [sic], and his finished work appears to have been accomplished easily."
John Eric Byers is regarded as one of America’s leading artists and through showrooms like Studio Twenty Seven, Phila, and the Loewe Foundation he is gaining an increasingly admiring audience in Europe. He has permanent collections in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has also been included in the Smithsonian's Oral Archives of American Arts. He has won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and a New York Foundation of the Arts Award amongst others.