Beauvais Lyons is a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he has taught printmaking since 1985. Lyons received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. See his web site for information on his mock-academic projects through the Hokes Archives. Lyons’ one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 60 museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. His prints are in numerous public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. PA. In 2002 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznañ, Poland. In 2014 he received the Santo Foundation Artist Award.

My studio work over the past thirty years has explored various forms of academic parody. My subjects have included archaeology, folk art, medicine, zoology and always various forms of biography. Prints are central to much of my work, as printed culture makes both science and history possible. In my approach to academic parody I place a great deal of emphasis on the interrelationship between the various elements in the exhibition. I strive for visual, thematic and conceptual continuity in the exhibitions through the use of repeated stylistic motifs and serial images. The genre of academic parody is potentially unlimited, and can take almost any form, style or medium to reflect almost any system of knowledge or belief. With these concerns I intend to create a work of fiction that is also a statement of truth.