Lines Traveling Through Space: Ghosts and Shadows by Tal Streeter

April 8, 2011 - November 15, 2011

Tal Streeter’s first works as an artist, while he was living, working,
and exhibiting in New York City galleries and museums in the 1960s,
drew on his Kansas background. These early sculptures were what he
describes as “a distillation, abstractions of the windblown grasses of
the Konza Prairie” and were exhibited in the 1964 New York World’s
Fair and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In his most recent work, minimalist structures of lines executed in a
combination of heavier and lighter materials move through and define
the space in which they are placed. Streeter says this work departs
from the tradition of non-objective minimalist art by suggesting
stories – for example, the passage from “youth, through middle age,
ending as ‘Ghosts.’” At the same time, the objects can be read as pure
structure, or “lines traveling through space.”

Streeter was born in Oklahoma City in 1934. His family moved to
Manhattan, Kansas, when he was two years old. He graduated from
Manhattan High School in 1952. Streeter attended the University of
Kansas, earning a BFA and MFA in design and sculpture and teaching
there before moving to New York to work in sculpture. In 1969
Streeter went to Japan to study the art of kite making. Following his
return to the United States two years later, he wrote The Art of the
Japanese Kite, arguably the most influential book about kites ever
published in English. He now lives in New York and Santa Fe, New
Mexico.