Heralded as a leading American artist working in wood. Permanent collections include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Arts and Design in NYC. 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. Mastering his personal 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.
Additional comments:
“… 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..."
- Museum of Arts and Design
“The carved, patterned surfaces add considerable interest to his simplified forms, as does his exquisite attention to detail.”
- New York Times
"He marries a painters attention to surface with a craftsman's devotion...art that references history and modernism".
- Boston Globe
"...his magnificent building blocks of design, the sphere and ellipse, circle, square, cylinder and rectangle.
- American Craft Magazine