Bio
April Street is from the coal mining region of the Appalachian Mountains. She currently lives and makes her work in Los Angeles, CA and Bristol, TN. She has exhibited her painting and sculpture in Chicago, Austin, Santa Monica, Los Angeles' Chinatown, as well as, in Nashville, TN where she exhibits with The Arts Company and annually shows during “Artrageous” – a benefit for AIDS education and services. As well, Street’s collaborative video work, "Imaging Appalachia, Virtual View," received a NEA Project Grant. Street has curated national exhibitions including the Virginia Museum Affiliate,William King Art Center’s “The Human Habit” benefitting breast cancer research. This exhibition included the work of Petah Coyne, as well as other prominent artists. She is also the developer of Southwest Virginia's first permanent sculpture garden and outdoor sculpture competition, "Blurring the Lines." April Street's educational background includes: The Art Institute of Chicago, East Tennessee State University (BFA), and bronze-casting and Art History in Italy.
April Street's work intersects the animal and human species with painting references to place the viewer somewhere between the abstract and representational, mixing artificial and natural worlds in ways that have become part of the artist's distinctive visual signature.
Her recent paintings are watery and space-like wonderscapes caught in states of advance, recession, and stillness. Precariously balanced by form, and desire, Street creates curiously layered paintings that combine saccharine-like colored stains and symbolic gestures with her own investigative narratives that she sets up, erases, overlaps and retells much like the relaying of an oral history that has been altered through passing.
