Schleeter's career rests on a sustained refusal of the dominant New Mexican painting traditions of his time , the picturesque Pueblo and landscape work of the Taos Society and the early Santa Fe colony, in favour of a heavily worked, abstract, and personal modernism that took him decades to find an audience for.
Schleeter came to art through his father, a Buffalo commercial artist whose work gave him an early familiarity with the technical demands of design and reproduction. His own brief Albright Art School training was followed by a long autodidactic period and a working life in unrelated trades, including the aircraft mechanic's job that brought him into proximity with the early aviation world and with Charles Lindbergh. The decision to commit to painting full time in his mid-twenties was a definitive break with that earlier working life.
The trip to New Mexico initiated the arrangement that would structure the rest of his life. The Albuquerque household he established with his wife became the working studio in which he developed his mature style across the next four decades, and the commitment to a primarily Albuquerque-based practice rather than to the better-known Taos or Santa Fe colonies was deliberate; the city's relative distance from the dominant New Mexican art scene gave him the freedom to develop his modernist vocabulary at his own pace.
The WPA commissions provided crucial financial stability through the Depression and gave him the platform for his first major public work. The Melrose murals, painted in 1936, registered a more representational vocabulary than his easel painting of the period, the federal mural programs preferred legible subject matter, but the easel work continued in parallel toward the abstraction that would dominate his later career.
By the late 1940s Schleeter had moved fully into abstraction, often built around primitive and tribal motifs that drew on the Southwestern indigenous visual traditions to which his New Mexican location gave him close access. The heavy impasto handling of his earlier years remained, but the imagery itself was now non-representational, and the work he produced through the 1950s and 1960s constitutes one of the most consistent bodies of early New Mexican abstraction.
The institutional recognition that came in the 1950s, the UNM teaching positions, the Guggenheim Younger American Painters invitation, and the steady acquisition of his work by regional institutions, confirmed his standing within the broader American art world even as the dominant New Mexican art establishment continued to favour landscape and figural traditions. The remaining decades of his life were spent in continued painting practice between Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Placitas, where he died in 1976.