Sam Messer and Jonathan Safran Foer

Sam Messer and Jonathan Safran Foer have worked collaboratively since 2001. Messer has made several portrait drawings of Foer, who is the subject of In a Beginning, a series of three prints made at the Neiman Center in 2014 using the techniques of woodcut, gravure, inkjet, collage and letterpress. Foer layered strands of handwritten texts in Top of the Stairs to create the central, pulsating abstract form.

Born in 1955, Messer received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1976 and an MFA from Yale University in 1982. He was appointed senior critic at Yale in 1994 and became associate dean and adjunct professor in 2005. He also serves at the director of the art division of the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk. Messer’s work is in the permanent collections of  The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has received awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Foer is an American novelist best known for his novels Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Here I Am, and for non-fiction works including Eating Animals.  He teaches creative writing at New York University. 

Learn more about this artist:

Artist’s Website
Yale
Time
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