Jack Pierson valuation

Jack Pierson was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1960 and graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1984, after a final year at Cooper Union in New York. He is counted among the Boston School of photographers, with Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe, who in the early 1980s photographed their own circle in situations that were, or looked, casual and intimate. In 1991 he made One Man's Opinion of Moonlight, a reconstructed bohemian apartment down to its junk drawer, which the critic Jack Bankowsky discussed in the Artforum essay that named slacker art. The same year he began his word sculptures, spelling out words and phrases in mismatched letters salvaged from junkyards, cinema marquees, roadside diners and Las Vegas casinos. Self Portrait, a book of 2003, shows fifteen men from boyhood to old age, none of them him, and the series was in the Whitney Biennial in 2004. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Photographs and word sculptures are most of what comes to market, with drawings, collages and artist's books. A photograph's size, edition and print date, and whether it is signed, decide what it is. Each word sculpture is unique, assembled from found letters whose worn paint and rust are part of the work, so any later repainting or repair needs disclosing. The records of the galleries that show him, Regen Projects in Los Angeles and Thaddaeus Ropac among them, settle most questions.