Jim Winters
Jim Winters attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, graduating Summa Cum Laude in January 1988 with a BFA in Sculpture. His education was augmented by a year at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore as part of the East Coast Art School Consortium. Upon graduating from college, Winters took a job at the Lawrence Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia and helped install artwork by such luminaries as Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson and Matt Mullican.
Following this, Winters embarked on an eleven-year freelance relationship with retail giant Urban Outfitters where he introduced a method of screen printing graphics on store windows – a technique still employed today.
He moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1992 and became involved with the seminal art gallery Kiki, where he had his first solo show. In addition to exhibiting at various artist-run galleries (ESP, Scene/Escena, Little Frankenstein’s, Showroom), he has been in group shows at larger venues: New Langton Arts and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Two of these shows also featured work by Wolfgang Tillmans and Shepard Fairey.
Winters’ varied interests have informed all of his work: vintage graphics and ephemera, portrait painting and photography, and textiles and wallpaper. A street art sticker project led to work with graphic designer Tom Bonauro on the Levi’s 501 Reasons campaign in the mid 1990’s. Subsequent high-profile projects ensued, including a year of horoscope illustrations for Flaunt magazine and concert posters for Bill Graham Presents. Other graphic design clients include Stanford University and the Northern California Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council.
Starting in 2000, Winters began focusing more on commercial decorative work. He mastered highly-detailed ornamentation while painting filigree on silk lampshades at Feneri Lighting. He then expanded his repertoire of skills under the tutelage of esteemed decorative painter Elisa Stancil at Stancil Studios. He continues to be involved with the company, now headed by James Stancil.
From 2007 to 2009 Winters held the position of Program Manager for the respected nonprofit Visual Aid, where he fostered and grew his contact base and orchestrated three of the organization’s signature “Big Deal” art auctions. While at Visual Aid, Winters was in charge of graphic design and creating posters and promotional materials for all of the organization’s events.
In December of 2009 Winters resumed full-time studio work and freelancing. He has created wall paintings (preferring this term over ‘mural’), both corporate and residential, for leaders in the tech sector. He has most recently painted wall graphics for the designers at Ken Fulk, Inc., one of San Francisco’s most sought-after interior design firms.
In the fall of 2011, Winters was an artist-in-residence at Denison University in Ohio. In keeping with the 2011-2012 campus theme of 'Migrations', he showed his landscape silk screen series entitled "Travelogue" and taught a workshop on reduction screen printing.
Jim Winters lives with his partner Jeff Stallings and their pup Otis in the Diamond Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.
www.jimwinters.com
