Biography

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Hyams attended the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she earned her BFA in 1959 and the University of Guanajuato, Mexico where she received her MFA in 1964. A former studio assistant of Philip Guston, Hyams has exhibited in the United States since 1970. Her work has been shown at institutions including the Oakland Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, Yerba Buena Art Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. Hyams’s has received numerous grants and fellowships including a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1973 and a Fulbrights Western European Regional Research Grant in 1984. Her work is held in the collections of the Joslyn Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor Auchenbach Collection. This will be the first work by Hyams to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2004)



Biography below from Leigh Hyams Website: http://www.artsreal.com/bio.html (UPDATE: this site no longer functions 5/9/18)
Over the years, artist Leigh Hyams’ subject matter has ranged from European megaliths and Mayan temples, Brazilian rain forests and Yosemite waterfalls, to giant images of imaginary flowers, Mexican folk art, dogs, and cows. Her work is distinguished by an edgy line quality, luminous color, and a passion for what frees us, makes us aware of a deeper reality, and brings us closer to the universe around us and the one inside ourselves.

Leigh's drawings, paintings, and artist’s books are in the permanent collections of the Achenbach Foundation in San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California Art, Des Moines Art Center, Joslyn Art Museum, the Palácio Imperial (Curitiba, Brazil), and the University of California at Irvine, as well as private collections in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her museum exhibitions also include two solo shows at the Paco Imperial Center for Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro, and, in Mexico, twenty of her five to eight foot unstretched canvasses of huge imaginary flowers were installed together recently as “El Jardin de Redon” at El Museo de la Ciudad de Santiago Querétaro.

She is a Fulbright scholar, having received a Western European regional research grant for her extensive series of paintings based on Megalithic sites, as well as the recipient of ten painting fellowships, including Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Rome, and George Rickey's Hand Hollow Foundation. She served as Founding Executive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Project in Woodside, California.

She has worked as an Adjunct Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, John F. Kennedy University, California College of Arts and Crafts, and University of California at Berkeley Extension. She has also taught art in mental institutions, Athabaskan Indian villages in Alaska, and at retreat centers, such as the Esalen Institute and La Serrania in Mallorca, Spain. For many years, she led international art tours for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Leigh passed away in 2013 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

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