Jay Lagemann's Bio
(In 250 words or less)
I have always liked making things. I fell in love with art when I spent my 18th summer travelling around Europe. At Princeton I took all the art courses available and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics in 1966.
Disillusioned by the Vietnam War, I returned to travelling after getting my Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I sailed across the North and South Atlantic and wrote an unpublished book before working my way on to the special effects crew for the movie JAWS 2. There I learned the skills to make just about anything. That came in handy because one day, sitting in the Sculpture Park at the Hirshorn Museum, I had a vision of creating the Wild Island Sculpture Park on my land in Chilmark.
In 1994 I created the monumental sculpture, the Swordfish Harpooner, in Menemsha for the Chilmark Tricentennial.
I work with a variety of materials because I view almost everything as sculpture from the placement of driftwood on the beach to the building of my own house and studios. I have a unique way of seeing things and in 1997 I started making my own public access TV show: Jay's View.
In 1975 I fell in love with Marianne Neill and her twin daughters Chris and Jenny. Together we created a life and a business, Marianne's Screen Printing, which prints the Black Dog T-shirts. Last year I became a grandfather when Chris had a baby, Sophia Red Hodges.
Looking at this page, now that I'm a grandfather of six I can see that it is totally out of date, so we will have to fix that. But now while I am on my 2007 Mountain Biking Adventure. I'll try to deal with it when I get back home to Martha's Vineyard later this spring. Last year Sam Teller wrote a piece about me in the Martha's Vineyard Gazette. For some reason they don't have all of their articles online, so I can't put a link to it here, I'll have to put up a copy.
There are a lot of ways to misspell my name. I think I'll list some of them here so that when someone is searching for me and doesn't know how to spell my name they will still have a good chance of finding this site. Jay Lagerman, Jay Lagermann, Jay Logerman, Jay Logermann, Logaman, Laggerman, Loggermann.