John Eric Byers creates geometrically inspired pieces that are minimal, emotional, and modernly refined. Mastering his uniquely original aesthetic for nearly four decades, John’s individually hand-made work is guided by purity in form, surface texture, structure, and respect for use of materials.
Heralded as a leading American artist working in wood, permanent collections include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design. Numerous awards include a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, New York Foundation of the Arts Awards, and inclusion in the Smithsonian's Oral Archives of American Arts.
Additional comments on his work:
“… purity of form and its core function remain uncompromised by his recurring, contemporary aesthetic language – a subtle manifesto that urges beauty to be infused more into the everyday”.
- Loewe Craft Foundation
"Like any master, Byers' hides his painstaking labor, and his finished work appears to have been accomplished easily..."
- Ursula Ilse Neuman / Museum of Arts and Design
“The carved, patterned surfaces add considerable interest to his simplified forms, as does his exquisite attention to detail.”
Grace Glueck / New York Times
"He marries a painters attention to surface with a craftsman's devotion...art that references history and modernism".
- Cate Mcquaid / Boston Globe
"...his magnificent building blocks of design, the sphere and ellipse, circle, square, cylinder and rectangle. Straightforward and solid, in Byers' skillful hands they serve as large canvases on which he projects mesmerizing carved patterns".
- Jeannine Falino / American Craft Magazine
"Painstaking artisanal work, rigorous design, and that organic but highly refined and sophisticated sensibility that’s the hallmark of what we call DesignCraft. "
- Regina Connell / Handful of Salt: The Craft of Modern Design
"Minimalist form meets maximal pattering through painstakingly wrought imperfection".
- Barbara Lovenheim / Breaking Ground: A Century Of Craft Art In Western NewYork