Implementalist Papers

Tyler Starr is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Davidson College. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in Studio Arts from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts where he was a recipient of the Japanese Ministry of Education Scholarship. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland. He was a 2011 Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa, a 2013 Christiania Researcher in Residence, Copenhagen, Denmark and a 2014 OMI International Arts Center resident. In June and July of 2018 he will be in residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA as a Fellowship Artist. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Yale University’s Haas Arts Library, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Liège, Belgium, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.

In Implementalist Papers, Starr continues his discursive survey of attempts to establish order in the world and the convoluted results. Topics explored include the typology that zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse developed in Japan through his study of coastal brachiopods, his grouping of ceramic shards to establish the Jomon period, and his book Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings. This is paired with reflections on Kenzo Tange’s Metabolist architecture in which cities are perceived as organisms, evident in Tange’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial and his design for the preschool attended by Starr’s son.