The photographs showcased at Reconnaissance Arts / Cafe Press show one aspect of Tal's rich artistic vision. Primarily a collage and assemblage artists, Tal's interest in photography sprang from her desire to work with her own original images in her collages. Because she brought an artist's eye to her gaze through the camera, many of the resulting photos stand well on their own. Clients and friends encouraged her to showcase the photos, and thus she created this site at CafePress. If you are interested in the original artworks themselves, please visit her Etsy store (http://kalital.etsy.com). You can also see a larger portfolio of her work at http://www.reconnaissancearts.com.

Kalí Tal was born in New York City in 1960. When her parents and many of her aunts and uncles moved to California in 1968, she was exposed to a new world of music, culture and endless sun. Her parents, young when she was born, but nonetheless the oldest of her numerous uncles and aunts, fully assimilated into Los Angeles culture during that intense and sometimes wild era. A bi-coastal child, Tal returned to New York many summers, to spend them with her maternal grandmother and other family members. She was exposed to music ranging from opera to Jimi Hendrix, and a range of art spanning The Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums of Art to the Modern, as well as the new art emerging from California galleries. This duality, in almost every facet of her life, informs her aesthetic and her art.

Tal has an excellent grasp of art history, genre, and style. Her parents were serious collectors, first of modern abstract artists including Miró, Calder, and Vaserely. By the early 1960s, however, they had expanded their interest to include Inuit sculpture and Athabascan arts. Gallery visits were lengthy and many of them included lectures on particular artists, their materials, their lives and their works. Both her parents and her maternal grandmother were members of fine art and folk art museums, which gave Tal access to art treasures in New York and Los Angeles and, later, in San Francisco and Denver. Since her family included world travelers, Tal was fortunate enough to view art all over Europe, from the Hermitage in Moscow to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Attracted both to traditional fine art and to folk arts, Tal decided to blend both into an art of her own.

In addition to being an artist, Tal is also a scholar. She received her B.A. in American Studies at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D. (also in American Studies) in 1990 at Yale University. Since graduation Tal has worked as a consultant for museumd and taught at places as various as Yale, Wesleyan, University of Maryland at College Park, George Mason University, Colorado Mountain College, and the University of Arizona. In 2005 she resigned from her Professorship at the U of Arizona to move to Berlin and devote herself to her art full-time.

In 2001, Tal realized that she was reaching a turning point in her teaching career. For years Tal had been teaching courses on West African retentions in African American cultures, doing her best to teach students of Western (harmonic) cultures the complexities and mind shifts required to understand and participate in African (polyrhythmic) cultures. Unsurprisingly, it was in the bridge between African (particularly West African) aesthetics and Western aesthetics that she found her artistic niche.

Tal's artwork has grown in sophistication and elegance of execution. They share a polyrhythmic visual aesthetic, a love of contrast, a mix of materials immediately at hand, and a sense of whimsy even in powerful and sometimes sad works. Tal respectfully draws upon West African, Mexican and southwestern imagery to create art that lives in the margins between cultures, celebrating one in the dress of another.