ARTIST STATEMENT

​

About the artist: James Byrne explores semi-abstract, richly colored imaginary worlds in digital drawings and video installations. Themes and content range from dream-like scenarios, to landscapes, to folktales gone awry, to portraits, and more. A faint narrative lingers in the background of each image and invites multiple interpretations.

 

His video installation, “Scale Drawing”, was recently shown at Walker Art Center in The Body Electric exhibition.  It will travel to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and will show there through January 2020.

 

Byrne has won arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bush Foundation, and McKnight Foundation, as well as grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Jerome Foundation.

 

His video art can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Banff Center for the Arts, Banff; The Kitchen, New York; and others.

 

Byrne earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Video Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed additional graduate study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.  He has a Bachelor of Elected Studies from the University of Minnesota.

​

​