Biography

Virginia A. Myers was born in Greencastle, Indiana in 1927 and grew up in Cleveland Ohio. She was an artist, professor, and inventor. Myers earned a B.A. in Drawing and Painting from George Washington University and the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. Then in 1951 she went on to earn an M.F.A. in Painting from The California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Myers completed additional graduate work at the University of Illinois (Urbana) and in 1955 came to the University of Iowa to study printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky. From 1961-1962, Myers studied in Paris under a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1962 Myers became a University of Iowa faculty member, where she taught printmaking in the School of Art and Art History. Myers presented in more than eighty-five one-person shows in the United States and participated in more than 150 juried exhibitions and traveling shows nationally and internationally.

In 1983 Myers began researching the use of gold leaf and foil in the printmaking process. She discovered that foil was not being used by artisans in the fine arts because the foiling process was strictly commercial. Her dissatisfaction with foiling options available to printmakers led her to invent the Iowa Foil Press, a device that allows individual artists to incorporate foil stamping into their work. After the invention of the press, she worked in conjunction with community members and students to improve and document the printmaking process of foil stamping using the Iowa Foil Press and they collectively produced a book, Foil Imaging...A New Art Form.

Myers died in 2015.

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