Oral history interview with Terry Winters

Scope and Contents

An interview with Terry Winters conducted 2018 November 13 and 15, by Christopher Lyon, for the Archives of American Art, at Winters' White Street Studio in New York, N.Y.

Scope and Contents

Winters speaks of his aversion to personal mythology in his artwork; his childhood in Brooklyn; early exposure to art exhibitions and classes in New York; his classical art education; formative encounters with avant-garde paintings in the 1960s; the development of his interest in architecture and industrial design; living in SoHo and refurbishing lofts for a living there in the 1970s; his early painting style in relation to Minimalism and Modernist abstraction; assisting in the construction of Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field;" his interest in incorporating natural structures and computational imaging in his paintings; the role of time in his painting practice; new directions in his painting practice beginning in the early 1980s; his decision to start exhibiting his artwork; the beginning of his printmaking practice; the interaction between his painting, printmaking, and drawing practices; his thoughts on the similarities between his artwork and that of Louise Bourgeois; the impetus for his midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum in the early 1990s; buying and constructing on a property in Columbia County, New York, where he now paints; the impetus and execution of his 2004 retrospective at the Addison Gallery of Art; developments and changes in his art-making practice between the Whitney and Addison retrospectives; his increasing creation of work in series; the role of scale in his painting practice; the development and implications of various individual works and series reproduced in the Addison retrospective catalog, including "Tenon's Capsule," "Computation of Chains," "Graphic Primitives," "Mesh Works," and "Turbulence Skins;" his collaboration with Trisha Brown; the development and execution of the books Perfection, Way, Origin with Jean Starobinski and "Turbulence Skins" with Ben Marcus; and the role of metaphor in readings of his work. Winters also recalls Ivan Karp, Herb Aach, Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Brice Marden, Robert Fosdick, Carroll Dunham, Klaus Kertess, Ileana Sonnabend, Florence Barron, Bill Goldston, Aldo Crommelynck, Lisa Phillips, Hendel Teicher, Adam Wienberg, Dave Douglas, Jennifer Tipton, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, and others.

Biographical / Historical

Interviewee Terry Winters (1949- ) is an artist in New York, N.Y., and Columbia County, N.Y. Interviewer Christopher Lyon (1949- ) is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.