Gretzinger, Jerry

(United States of America, 1942)

Jerry Gretzinger born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1942, studied architecture and liberal arts at the Universities of Michigan and California.
He joined the Peace Corps in 1966 and spent 2 years in Tunisia, later returning in 1968 as an architect with an archeological team cataloging the Roman mosaics there. He came back to the United States in 1973 and started a handbag design company in New York. In the early 1980s Jerry was joined by his wife Meg Staley in the design and manufacture of women’s clothing.
He retired to Maple City, Michigan in 2004. In 1963 he began drawing a map of an imaginary city. It now comprises over 3600 individual eight by ten inch panels. Its execution, in acrylic, marker, colored pencil, ink, collage, and inkjet print on heavy paper, is dictated by the interplay between an elaborate set of rules and randomly generated instructions.