Jerome Myers

1867 - 1940

American (Petersburg, Virginia - New York City)

Jerome Myers was born into a struggling family in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1867. He spent some time in the foster care system and in an orphanage due to his mother’s poor health and hospitalizations, but was ultimately reunited with his family. He later focused his artwork on these communities, becoming one of the first American artists to portray life in poor immigrant American neighborhoods.
Myers settled in New York City in 1886, beginning his studies a year later at Cooper Union and, later, at the Art Students’ League, where he stayed for eight years. He went on to exhibit in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, winning a bronze medal with his painting Night Concert, and later participated in the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists and 1913 Armory Show. Myers’ work is characterized by his approach to representing people in poverty. Myers saw “beauty and poetry” in the positivity and hope that he saw in the faces of his subjects, a hope he tried to reproduce on the canvas. His focus on the lives of impoverished immigrants in New York City pioneered a new progressive movement in American art over which Myers had significant influence and which ultimately has changed the course of American art.