Merryll Saylan

Merryll Saylan was born in 1936 in the Pelham Parkway area of The Bronx borough of New York City.[2][3] She moved to and lived in Los Angeles in her youth, where she had an early musical education in piano and viola.[3] She attended UCLA right after graduating high school, where she met her first husband, but would drop out.[3] She ended up attending UCLA once again, after first taking some classes at Santa Monica City College.[3]

Saylan began woodturning in the mid-1970s.[4] On her earliest works, Saylan recalled, "When I first started I had been making sculpture, but to pay my studio rent, started turning bowls. I also made turned and constructed furniture."[4] In 1982, a house's workshop space in Berkeley, California, caught the attention of Saylan and her partner, Edward Saylan.[5] The two, with the help of fellow artist friends, would remodel the house over the next three decades or so.[5]

Saylan came from a background in modern and contemporary design.[6] During her second tenure attending UCLA for her undergraduate studies, she chose design as her major.[3][4][7] During her time in college, she tended to her three children after classes.[4][7] She was one of the first women in the woodturning field; in an interview with the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), she stated, "It was definitely a guy's game in the beginning. I remember reading that in one of the earliest newsletters."[4]

From the early 1980s on, Saylan helped pioneer the application of color in wood art.[8] Additionally, her combining of materials, as well as the surface texturing in her works, helped make her pieces more unique during an era of wood art in which furniture-making was the norm and the natural look of the wood was a primary concern.[4][6] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer commented that her Jelly Donut (1979) work "incorporates one segment of red resin, as if a prosthetic body part," for example.[9] She completed her M.A. in studio art at CSUN.[3]

In 1986, she became a member of the newly established AAW and would serve as president of its board from 1995 to 1996.[4] At the request of Art in Embassies, Saylan visited Fiji in February 2004, where she presented her work and held workshops for students and local art organizations.[10] The U.S. Department of State noted that Saylan's visit prompted attention from the Fijian media and was "covered extensively by a few national papers as well as a nationally televised channel."[10]

Saylan's life and work are documented in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[4] Several of her works are exhibited in museums across the United States; the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, North Carolina houses her Jelly Donut, as well as her Untitled (1998) piece.[11] In 2016, Saylan was noted by the AAW to reside and continue to work in Berkeley, California.[4] In 2018, however, Saylan put her Berkeley home up for sale and moved to Colorado to live closer to her son and grandchildren.[5]