Jerry Harty

I've been making art consistently since the mid-1990s. For most of my working life, I had a professional career far removed from the art world, while art developed alongside it as an increasingly important part of my life. I'm primarily self-taught, and it all began with a printmaking class.

Relief printing — particularly linocuts and woodcuts — was my starting point, and over the years my curiosity has led me to screen printing, cyanotype, drypoint etching, gel plate printing, and other ways of putting ink on paper.

Around the same time in the late-90s, I took a glass-fusing workshop and was hooked. I bought a kiln and started experimenting. One kiln eventually became several, and what began with a workshop grew into another major part of my studio practice. For 15 years, I taught kiln-formed glass at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts before shifting my teaching focus to printmaking in 2024.

I tend to move freely between materials and processes. In addition to printmaking and kiln-fused glass, I've worked with collage, assemblage, glass mosaic, and slow stitching. I enjoy learning a new process, figuring out what I can do with it, and occasionally finding uses for it that probably weren't in the instructions.

Whatever the medium, my work tends to share the same point of view. I like bold shapes, color, texture, and a certain amount of whimsy. Fish, birds, dogs, and other characters have a habit of finding their way into what I make. I take the process of making art seriously, but I don't think the finished art always has to take itself quite so seriously. If something I make causes someone to stop, look a little longer, and smile, I'm happy.

Currently I divide my time — and my artmaking — between studios in Portage, Michigan, and Rancho Mirage, California. I continue to make and exhibit my own work and teach printmaking workshops, something I especially enjoy because it gives me the chance to share the processes and experimentation that have kept me interested in art for more than three decades.

I am a juried artist at the Desert Art Center in Palm Springs and a member of the Southwest Michigan Printmakers, and I've exhibited my work throughout the Midwest and in Southern California.