| Ted Larsen | |
| Birth Place: | South Haven, Michigan |
| Field: | Contemporary visual art |
| Training: | Northern Arizonan University and Whittier College |
Ted Larsen (born 1964) is an American contemporary visual artist living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He makes small scale work from repurposed salvaged materials.
As a young child, Larsen was attracted to discarded tools, tractor parts, and other equipment that lay in a pile on his family property in South Haven, Michigan. He also played in abandoned airplanes in a nearby airport.[1] At the age of 15 Larsen moved from Michigan to Santa Fe with his family. After graduating from Santa Fe Preparatory School, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.[2]
Ted Larsen found early success as a landscape painter that included iconic barn images. By the time he was 22, he exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[3] He was dissatisfied with painting and abandoned his practice after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. He began cutting and arranging scraps of metal, built around a substructure of birch laminate material. With a painter's eye, Larsen searches for material to work with at salvage yards, then further processes materials in his studio. Larsen states, "I am indeed looking for a palette— different types of greens, blues, yellows. They have to have a certain quality, not too raw, not too clean."[4]
Larsen's work has been exhibited widely in private foundations and museums in the US, including the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe,[5] The Albuquerque Museum,[6] The Amarillo Museum of Art,[7] and The Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, Missouri.
He was a guest lecturer at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts; the Santa Fe University of Art and Design; the Palm Springs Art Museum; the New Mexico Museum of Art; SITE Santa Fe; the Texas Society of Architects; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado;[8] the Denver Museum of Art.[9] [10]
His work was favorably reviewed by Elisabeth Sussman.[11]
Larsen's received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award,[12] as well as grant recipient of the Surdna Foundation; residencies with the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Asilah Arts Festival in Morocco, where he represented the United States.[13]