Jayme Odgers

His work is an elaborate typographic conceit and as such his practice aligns with Desmond TuTu’s assessment that “language creates the reality it describes.”  Coming from the world of graphic design he has long had a love affair with letters, words, and typography. The power to distill a large amount of information into a shorter sequence of letters means that he could create a visual language that would instruct an iteration of reality––one where the state of language is always in flux.  The philosophy and ideology of Buddhism informs the language he uses, along with a principal tenant “nowness.”

A spiritual dialogue remains constant throughout each work and points to a questioning of space and of one’s existence. In its questioning however, the work establishes a space of its own.

Born in Butte, Montana, Jayme Odgers graduated from The Art Center School in Los Angeles with a Bachelors Degree in Art with Great Distinction. In 1966 Odgers was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Europe. During this phase of his life, he was honored with over 100 awards of excellence in design including Gold and Silver Medal Awards plus an international silver Typomundus Award for Excellence in typography. He was awarded an Honorary 2006 Henry Award for extraordinary conribution to California Modernist Design by the newly formed Museum of California Design.

Odgers continued garnering world-wide attention being seminal in establishing a new look for California design producing work which was later exhibited at the Museo Fortuny in Venice, Italy in 1987. In 1983, Jayme Odgers was selected along with fourteen ‘world class’ artists, including David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Johnathon Borfosky, and John Baldessari, to do an official poster of the XXIII Olympic Games, the XXIIIrd Olympiad, held in Los Angeles. In 1986, Odgers was one of eight international artists commissioned to design a poster commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Thieme, the international publishing firm of Zurich, Switzerland.

Numerous books and articles have included Odgers’ work. In addition to teaching at the Art Center College of Design, the California Institute of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Odgers has guest taught and lectured extensively. In 1995 he toured and lectured in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, Japan at the invitation of the Tokyo Gakuin.

His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Art, Arco Center for the Visual Arts, The Albright Knox Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City and The White House in Washington, D.C. Jayme’s poster for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences was included in the Walker Art Center’s 1984 landmark show, Posters of The Century: Design of the Avant Garde along with works by Rodchenko, Man Ray and Paul Rand.

His current work will be exhibited at Billy Shire Fine Arts in Culver City, California.