Mel Byars

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 further recognition in a poetry contest.

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. and subsequently settled in New York City.

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.

Prof. 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, Prof. 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. He has made other donations to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Uměleckoprůmyslová museum v Praze), Israel Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Columbia Museum of Art.

Prof. 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 and at others as well as lectured widely 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.

He retired in 2015 when in his 80s. Provided by Wikipedia