Beauvais Lyons
Lyons’ prints connect his current body of work (The Association for Creative Zoology; an archive of fictional truths) to his experience of making work in NYC. References to actual places and people, along with scholarly titles, are a satirical attempt to validate fictitious creatures, like the NYC native Rat-Pigeon, and characters like Reverend James Randolph Denton. The presentation and format of Lyon’s imagery imbues the work with the authority of an institutionally sanctioned documentary endeavor.
About the artist
Beauvais Lyons has been a printmaking professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville since 1985 and for the past twenty-five years, he has explored various forms of academic parody in his work. His subjects have ranged from archaeology and folk art to medicine and zoology, always involving some form of biography. Lyons’ work explores the role of imagination and invention within the realm of “scientific truth.” Lyons has exhibited both nationally and internationally. His prints are held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.