John Alan Nyberg
About the Artist
John Alan Nyberg was born in 1942 and grew up on the Slash Seven Ranch at Lapoint in Utah's Uintah Basin. He displayed an early aptitude for drawing and from the time he could hold a pencil or brush, no blank white space was safe from his creative urges. He studied painting and drawing with Eve Thorpe as his mentor, and received his BFA and MFA from Utah State University at Logan, Utah in visual art. Additional training was taken at the San Francisco Art Academy and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He has taken work shops or classes from the internationally know and respected Bay artists Joan Brown, Wayne Thiebaud and Joseph Raffael.
Before painting full time, Nyberg worked at many jobs; ranch hand, cowboy, sawmill hand, sign painter, industrial painter, combat engineer, illustrator, casino worker, secondary art teacher, visual art curriculum specialist, university and instructor and gallery director. For over three decades he was one of the Mountain West's premier modernist-experimenters. Nyberg was one of the first area artist to work with mixed-media assemblages, photo copy art, and mail art. His work has been exhibited in many competitions in several sates and several countries. The painters and prints have won several local, national and international awards. The work is in numerous private and public collections world wide.
At present, he is exploring and trying to push abstract vision using new paint technology with mixed-media with collaged acrylic paint peels. Many layers of paint are built up on 6 mil plastic sheeting then peeled off and mounted on gessoed board. The paint peels have also been exhibited in New York City and other venues unmounted and hung directly on the wall with stick pins. The latest works use wonderful color and are innovative and imaginative. One a few artists worldwide are working in his genre.
Shows include the BGH Gallery located in the prestigious Bergamot Station Art Complex in Santa Monica, California, and the Winchester Center Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada. His work was selected to be part of a group show at Viridian Artists Inc., in New York City. The juror for the show was Anne Lampe, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was a winner in the Clark County, Nevada Van-go project. One of his works was printed on a billboard sized vinyl sheet which has been laminated on a Clark County bus and was seen during 2002-05 in Las Vegas. The project, including John's work was voted the staff pick for the best Las Vegas public art project by the Las Vegas Review. In 2002 he was awarded an International Artist Award by the IAOCA in Kyoto, Japan, and was awarded best of show at the "Spring Art Salon and Competition" in Mesquite, Nevada. He was interviewed for a show on Las Vegas PBS Channel 4 about his art and the Van-go project. The program aired daily during April and May of 2002. He also had an article about him in Where Las Vegas Magazine- a nationally distributed publication. His work was show in the 2004 San Francisco International Art Exposition, Art Chicago and a Summer Group Show by PDX Contemporary Art of Portland, Oregon. In September of 2005, he was awarded first place in the 14th Annual National Juried Show, at Art Institute and Gallery, Salisbury, Maryland. The juror for the show was Stephen Haller of Stephen Haller Gallery in New York CIty.
