Jim Melchert

Jim Melchert was born in 1930 in Ohio. After his undergraduate studies in art history at Princeton University, he taught English in Japan for four years in exchange for the rich experience of living there. Returning to the United States, he earned degrees in painting at the University of Chicago and in ceramics at the University of California, Berkeley, studying under Peter Voulkos. Finding the Bay Area to be receptive to artists in the way that watering holes are to migratory birds, he settled in Oakland and thrived on the interaction among his colleagues and young artists at UC Berkeley, where he taught. From 1977 to 1981, he was the director of the visual arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and from 1984 to 1988, the director of the American Academy in Rome.

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