Born in Butte, Montana, Jayme Odgers graduated from The Art Center School in Los Angeles with a Bachelors Degree in Art with Great Distinction. In 1964 he became Paul Rand’s assistant by designing graphics for the IBM Pavilion fort the 1963 World’s Fair in Flushing New York.
In 1966 Odgers was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Europe. During this phase of his life, he was honored with over 100 awards of excellence in design including Gold and Silver Medal Awards plus an international silver Typomundus Award for Excellence in typography.
In 1983, Jayme Odgers was selected along with fourteen ‘world class’ artists, including David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Johnathon Borfosky, and John Baldessari, to do an official poster of the 1984 Olympic Games, the XXIIIrd Olympiad, held in Los Angeles.
In 1986, Odgers was one of eight international artists commissioned to do a poster commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Thieme, the international publishing firm of Switzerland. Odgers continued garnering world-wide attention in helping to establish a new look for California design producing work which was later exhibited at the Museo Fortuny in Venice, Italy in 1987
His work has been exhibited at theBrooklynMuseum, the San Francisco Museum of Art,ArcoCenterfor the Visual Arts, The Albright Knox Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’sCooper-HewittMuseuminNew York Cityand The White House inWashington,D.C.
Jayme’s poster for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences was included in theWalkerArtCenter’s 1984 landmark show, Posters of The Century: Design of the Avant Garde along with works by Rodchenko, Man Ray and Paul Rand.
He was also awarded an Honorary 2006 Henry Award for extraordinary contribution to California Modernist Design by the newly formedMuseumofCalifornia Design. Also, In 2006 Odgers’ was included in Megg’s History of Graphic Design.
In 2012 his work was included in POSTMODERISM, Style and Subversion 1970–1990 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, as well as in the latest Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designer by Thames & Hudson.
In addition to teaching at The Art Center School and its later incarnation the Art Center College of Design, the California Institute of the Arts and Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles, Jayme has guest taught and lectured extensively. He has toured and lectured in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, Japan at the invitation of the Tokyo Gakuin, and was commissioned to co-design two water fountains for the Metropolitan Water District’s Headquarters Building plaza in downtown Los Angeles.
