Above: Photo credit: Tyler Hays
"The Art of Making Everything”
Thursday, November 7, 4:00 p.m.
Watch a video of the Tyler Hays lecture on YouTube.
Tyler Hays is an American artist, born and raised in northeastern Oregon. He received his BFA in painting at the University of Oregon in 1994. Throughout his life, he has worked creatively and professionally in a wide array of mediums—from painting, food, music, and furniture, to ceramics, metalwork, fashion, and architecture—with a through-line focus on material science and engineering. He often says the true unifying subject of his work is finding the lines between things. “The harder you look, the more similar everything becomes, and the more difficult it is to know where to stop.” Much of the art, for Hays, is the alchemy of finding these connections.
Tyler Hays grew up with a strong desire to make everything in his universe from scratch. This foundational impulse started very young— sewing and cooking, taking apart his toys—and followed him to art school, where he mixed his own paints and made his paint brushes from scratch with hand-pounded silver ferrules. His interests and fluencies are surprisingly expansive yet always centered around the same soup-to-nuts compulsion and fetish-level research into the deconstruction of objects down to their elements. While painting continues to be his primary and most consistent medium, Hays has become best known as the creative force behind the enigmatic company BDDW, which has maintained galleries in New York, London, and Los Angeles. BDDW continues to be the exclusive retailer and auction house of his furniture, art, and objects. Tyler lives and works between Philadelphia, New York, and Oregon.
This lecture is made possible by the Davis Family Endowed Fund in Art.