Jeremy Mayer – The Oakland Artists Project

Jeremy Mayer was born in 1972 in Northern Minnesota. He is an American sculptor who uses typewriter parts, some dating back more than 80 years, making them into futuristic sculptures in a process that he calls “cold assembly.”

Mayer attended and graduated high school in Minnesota. He moved to Northern California in 1990, and he now lives and works in Oakland. Jeremy became more familiar with typewriters because his close friends ran a typewriter repair shop. He already had an artistic mind and creative ideas that he combined when creating his sculptures.

Jeremy collects vintage typewriters that are in very rough shape, which are more often than not completely unusable or beyond reasonable repair. He gets them from yard sales, flea markets, thrift stores, or friends. He then dismantles them very carefully by hand, not by using power tools. Mayer’s sculptures are usually human figures, animals, or insects. The sculptures are assembled by hand without using glue or any type of adhesive to hold parts together.

Haunts:

His works have been displayed at various museums, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Salon des Indomptables in Paris, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums. Mayer also traveled to Mumbal to pay homage to the last set of Godraj and Boyce typewriters, where he spent six months. Jeremy at one point did his sculpting in Richmond and Berkeley, but he now lives and works in Oakland. The images displayed below are the ones that have been shown in SFMOMA and the Nevada Museum of Art.