School of Art Welcomes Artist Steve Locke to U of A Campus

Ross Collab

Steve Locke

The School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is proud to announce that artist Steve Locke will speak as part of its Visiting Lecture Series at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 5, in Hillside Auditorium 202.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1963, Locke grew up in Detroit, Michigan. In 2001, he received his M.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Extending his commitment to his artistic practice with a focus in painting, Locke began to seek alternative ways to amplify public engagement around his art partnering with institutions, municipalities and even the United States Postal Service to reach new audiences.

Locke is a New York-based artist whose paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations live at the intersections of portraiture, identity and modernism. From the seductive nature of his paintings to the familiar but unreliable record of his photographs, he directs our gaze to help audiences look critically and unflinchingly at our shared history.

He recontextualizes images and marries the contemporary and the historical, aiming to show that the sins of the American past are alive and well and beg to be addressed. Instead of solely memorializing victims or revisiting trauma, he steers the viewer to the source of the violence. His goal is to not allow the audience to look away from our complicit role but stands beside us as we face it.

"Steve Locke's work brings a dynamic perspective to the intersection of color, what it means to look and history," said Aaron Turner, assistant professor of art in photography. "I think his lecture will be eye opening for students on what is possible within the traditional and expanded field of art."

Locke's Homage to the Auction Block interrogates similar themes. Re-envisioning Josef A. Albers's Homage to the Square series, these compositions mark a significant formal departure from the artist's earlier works. Imbuing Albers's reductive imagery with an ominous charge, Homage to the Auction Block abstracts a slave auction block to its most basic geometric silhouette—reflecting Locke's belief that "the basic modernist form is indeed the slave auction block." Queering the pure formalism and color theory of Albers, Homage to the Auction Block unpicks the intertwined histories of race and modernism.

He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the LEF Contemporary Work Fund Grant and the Art Matters Foundation Award.

Solo exhibitions include the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, among others. He has done projects with ForFreedoms, Kickstarter, the Boston Public Library and P.S. Satellites/Prospect IV in New Orleans and has had gallery exhibitions with yours mine & ours, Samsøñ, LaMontagne Gallery, Gallery Kayafas and Mendes Wood. He attended residencies with the City of Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The MacDowell Colony and Skowhegan.

Currently, he is a professor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He is represented by LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and Alexander Gray Associates in New York City.

Learn more about Locke and his work Thursday, Oct. 5, at 5:30 p.m. in Hillside Auditorium.