James Lee Byars

Decades after the death of the artist and aesthetic heretic James Lee Byars, episodes from his life have taken on the aura of urban legend. Born and raised in Detroit, he spent much of his adult life outside the United States. His first sojourn overseas was to Japan in 1958 at age twenty-six, and over the next ten years he traveled between Japan and the U.S. seven times. Later in life he spent several years in Europe, and died in Cairo in 1997.

Curator and art historian Sakagami Shinobu here traces Byars’s formative years in Detroit, a period about which virtually nothing has been published. Extensive interviews with those who knew him do much to clarify facts about his early growth as an artist and to provide a picture of the environment that nurtured it. This companion book to the author’s lauded James Lee Byars: Days in Japan illuminates a similarly crucial yet overlooked period in the artist’s development.