Though born in New York, Tara Donovan launched her career in Washington, D.C., with exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery in 1997 and ’99. Her method was clear from the start -- sensuous accumulations of a single type of industrial material, often assembled according to a simple rule, often in a topological scheme. At the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she exhibited Ripple (1998), a floor piece constructed of scads of short pieces of wire arranged to resemble concentric, circular ripples. In 2003 she stacked more than two million clear plastic straws, woodpile-style, against the wall at Ace Gallery in New York.

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