Wall Of Fame TAL STREETER Class of 1952
In Tal Streeter’s senior year at MHS, a facility for art a classmate observed in their Bluemont School days led to his illustrating the 1952 Blue M. Active in music and drama, he graduated from MHS with an art scholarship to KU. After his BA, MA and army service he moved to New York City, in the late 1950s the most exciting place in the world for an artist. From Manhattan to Manhattan, his continued inspiration has been the space of the Kansas prairie and its “big sky.” His first exhibition was in 1965. His seventy-foot-high “Endless column,” displayed next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, was the tallest sculpture ever shown in NYC; the Museum of Modern Art added examples of his work to their permanent collection.

In 1969 Streeter expanded his career to travel the world. Living in Japan with his family, he became the first artist in the western world to study Asian kites and to make and exhibit his kites as “sky art;” his first book, Art of the Japanese Kite, was acclaimed a classic. He made Seoul, Korea’s first large-scale public sculpture. Artist, writer and teacher, Streeter was a Fulbright Professor in Korea; founded the Sculpture-Media Area of New York State University at Purchase, the state’s arts campus, in 1973; was a Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and artist-in-residence at many universities. He lives with his wife in New York’s Hudson Valley and Santa Fe, NM working at art and long-term writing projects: books on flight and documenting his travels with a circus in India.