Born in Cleveland, Ohio, James Osher attended Carnegie Mellon University and received his Masters of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, studying with John Baldessari and Alan Kaprow. Jamesí career evolved from painting to conceptually focused work, creating a large-scale urban environmental sculpture project for Cleveland State University and The New Gallery. In 1979, he stopped making art objects, and for two year, as a performance artist, became a stockbroker, metamorphosing into a non-artist thirteen year career in the investment industry. In the early nineties, dramatically impacted by his mother’s terminal illness in addition to the public announcement that a close acquaintance and her son were HIV positive and that her young daughter (similar in age to the eldest of his three sons) had died of AIDS, he acknowledged his inherent desire to create objects, and his personal need to communicate through artwork. In1995 James retired from the investment indu