Terry Talty

Terry Talty is a writer and conceptual artist with a BFA from the University of Denver, emphasis in printmaking and communications, specifically art criticism. Her aim was to develop a jargon-free style that illustrated the value of contemporary art to any reader.

After college and a final summer immersed in art talk and action at SummerVail Art Workshop, she started an art bronze foundry in rural Colorado. The foundry also had a 6-foot etching press. She made drawings, prints and became professional at finishing bronze sculpture, until her brother died. She was compelled to write his biography, in a novel way, and reached back to years of writing poetry, graduate-level poetry classes with Burton Raffel at DU, and from her journalism classes and college newspaper and magazine work. To get more experience she took a job at a mountain newspaper.

For the next twenty-some years, she alternated between newspaper work and art marketing. Most significantly, she and her husband ran a metalsmithing gallery for 15 years, and she curated several exhibitions per year.

Naturally the arts were her specialty as a journalist, but politics became her unlikely second beat. She ran a wire service of state government news for rural Colorado dailies, and conducted a series of political opinion interviews that involved former secretaries of Defense and Interior among others. In 2002, she started writing a blog for the website UnsafeArt. It expanded when she moved to France in 2004, and is now developing into the jargon-free, illustrative arts writing she set out to write years ago. Links to this blog are also available from the Invisible Museum.