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Mel Byars (born in Columbia, South Carolina) is an American design historian.
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Mel Byars (born in Columbia, South Carolina) is an American design historian.
The earliest award he received a small trophy at age thirteen for a school-newspaper piece. Two years later he was granted further recognition in a poetry contest.[ citation needed ]
Previously to The New School’s graduate curriculum of School of Media Studies, he studied journalism in the late 1950s at the University of South Carolina. [1] [2] and subsequently settled in New York City. [3]
His first professional employment was as a book designer of a large number of titles for McGraw-Hill in New York City, including the format General McArthur’s autobiography and 888-page Warren Commission report of the John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Byars eventually became active as an art director or creative director for a number of publishers, including a group of professional magazines at Bill Publications in the late 1960s, after Prentice-Hall and for advertising agencies] such as Leber Katz Partners (subsumed into Foote, Cone & Belding, the world's second oldest advertising agency, founded 1873). 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, Byars turned to the history of applied art/industrial design and served as the archivist and organizer of the Thérèse Bonney Photography Collection (images of 1925-35 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. [4] He has made other donations to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Uměleckoprůmyslová museum v Praze), [2] Israel Museum, [5] Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Columbia Museum of Art. [2]
Byars has taught at Pratt Institute and Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Holon Institute of Technology in Israel [6] and at others as well as lectured widely [7] while remaining active in the advertising sector. From 2017 to 2019, he wrote essays on a wide range of subjects for Elephant art and culture magazine. [8] [9]
He retired in 2015 when in his 80s.[ citation needed ]
Byars's most significant work is the second edition (2004) of The Design Encyclopedia, which won the Besterman/McColvin Gold Medal for the best reference book of 2004 from the British Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. [10] [11] When active in graphic design earlier in his career, he won a number of awards, including from the Art Directors Club of New York and had works published in various books such as 100 Years of Dance Posters [12] and Dance Posters. [13]
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. , Beaux Arts, Clear, Echoes, Graphis, [14] form, and other periodicals. A number of the books have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Hebrew. [15]
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