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About Mel Byars
- Mel Byars (born in Columbia, South Carolina), is an American design historian. Byars studied journalism in the 1950s at the University of South Carolina.
- He subsequently settled in New York City and eventually became active as an art director or creative director for a number of publishers, such as Prentice-Hall and McGraw-Hill, and for advertising agencies, including 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, he turned to the history of applied art/industrial design and served as the archivist 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 (Umeleckoprumyslová museum v Praze), Israel Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and Columbia Museum of Art.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.
- Since May 2017, he writes a column for Elephant art and culture magazine.
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