The Artist: Steve Locke
We all have to go outside of what we know.
5 QUESTIONS WITH STEVE LOCKE
Artist
Brooklyn, NYC
Steve Locke (b.1963) was born in Cleveland, OH and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to muse on the connections between desire, identity, and violence.
In 2001, Steve Locke received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Extending his commitment to a painting practice, Locke began to seek alternative ways to amplify public engagement around his art, partnering with institutions, municipalities, and even the US Postal Service to reach new audiences.
Throughout his artistic career, Locke’s work has questioned how we ascribe meaning to portraiture. Speaking about the series when you’re a boy..., which he began in 2005, Locke says that he makes “drawings and paintings that explore relationships between and among men. The exchange of looks, the privilege of looking and the wish to be seen are positions I explore to reveal the ways men respond, desire, and relate to each other.”
Other works by Locke imbue portraiture with menace and pain. #Killers (2017–present) presents viewers with skillfully rendered portraits of men and women who have killed Black people. These chilling images, in Locke’s words, “direct the viewer to the source of this kind of violence against black people. The source is these men and the inchoate, and unnameable whiteness that creates and supports them. ... They are killers adrift in the lie of whiteness.”
Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block (2019–present) interrogates similar themes. Re-envisioning Josef A. Albers’s 1950–1976 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.
Locke’s practice ultimately pushes viewers to confront and critically engage with a complicated present and painful past. As he concludes, “If art is anything, it’s a public discourse. I’m not making art because I’m trying to express myself or share my feelings with the world because my feelings are no different than anyone else’s. I’m not special because I’m an artist. What I can do is I can make people pay attention to things through composition, through color, through scale, through organization through conceptual frameworks. I can make people look at something and think about it.”
Steve Locke’s work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including in the name of love, the Gallatin Galleries, New York University, NY (2019); Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (2018); Love Letter to a Library, the Boston Public Library, MA (2018); The School of Love, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA (2018); there is no one left to blame, curated by Helen Molesworth, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013), traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2014); and Rapture, curated by Erin Dziedzic, the Hall Street Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA (2008). He has also participated in a multitude of group exhibitions, including Feedback, curated by Helen Molesworth, The School, Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY (2021); The BIG Picture: Giant Photographs and Powerful Portfolios, the Fitchburg Art Museum, MA (2020); Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination, the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA (2020); Coded, curated by Alexandria Smith, the Mills Gallery, the Boston Center for the Arts, MA (2018); Nine Moments for Now, curated by Dell Marie Hamilton, the Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2018); Gay, curated by Ivan Monforte, the Longwood Art Gallery, the Bronx Council of the Arts, NY (2014); Paint Things: Beyond the Stretcher, curated by Evan Garza and Dina Deitsch, the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2013); and Making a Mark, curated by Helen Shlien, the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA (2002). Locke’s work is in the collections of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC; the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and the Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA. He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2020), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014), the LEF Contemporary Work Fund Grant (2009), and the Art Matters Foundation Award (2007). Locke is also represented by LaMontagne Gallery in Boston, MA.
1. How can the cultural sector best contribute to a re-alignment of a system that has historically promoted inequity? Specifically, how might arts funders most effectively help drive this change?
Before anything, arts funders need to support equitable tax laws and equal access to the ballot.
I am not someone who believes that the system consciously promotes inequity. What I do believe is that people are more comfortable with people like themselves or people who affirm them. The arts are no different in this regard. The people who engage in philanthropy, cultural giving, and support for the arts are not any different than anyone else — they just have more resources. So if they want to contribute to any kind of realignment, then they have to engage with things outside of what they have known or want to know. There are a lot of artists and arts organizations that need support and they are not always the ones that we read about or know about. This means that we all have to go outside of what we know.
2. When you spoke to the Arts Funders Forum (AFF) community, we discussed how arts education might be most impacted by the pandemic. What do you now see as the lasting impacts on arts education, for better or worse?
I always keep in mind that people have gotten educations during war, famine, and disease. The notion that the pandemic is so terrible for education is specious to me. What it is revealing is that a lot of people will only do things if they are easy. It is very hard to be an artist in the first place. If you really want to be an artist, then nothing will get in your way. I think of Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon, Vaclav Havel, David Wojnarowicz, Diamanda Galas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Paul Stopforth, and many many others who made art and/or completed their training during terrible times.
The one thing about COVID that has shocked me deeply is how little younger people seem to care about older people-especially the health and safety of their older professors. A lot of students have not understood why people are not available to them in previous ways, why they cannot have large congregate openings or have established visiting artists come to their studios. I try to explain to them that many established artists are older, may have health issues, and are happy to engage with them in conversation via Zoom, but for many of the students, that is not enough for them. They feel like they deserve to have access to people, spaces, and gatherings without thinking about the impact of their actions on the older generation. They sometimes act like consumers who have paid for a service that should be delivered to them, instead of like students who are engaged in an environment of learning that is not organized around their pleasure. Schools in many ways are to blame for this — framing higher education as a site of personal affirmation rather than learning.
3. Arts Funders Forum (AFF) research shows that the cultural sector has been experiencing a crisis of relevancy. Both arts funders and cultural leaders tell us that the arts do a subpar job of expressing the sector’s value to society — art and culture is considered a “nice to have”, not a “must have.” This could be why giving to the arts sector decreased by 8% during the pandemic*. What narratives should be communicated to clarify how the role of the artist, arts funder, and arts organization is essential to global progress and our humanity?
Artists are always marginalized and called irrelevant or a luxury under fascism. Giving to the arts is not considered important because people are no longer taught the value of the arts. In American life right now, the only value something can have is monetary. There are other values that are no longer important to people so people are only interested in things that give them a return on investment. Combine this with the notion that many people privilege “experiences” over “objects” and you have a moment where spectacle and sensation will always get more attention that objects created for contemplation or engagement.
The fight is to actually use k-12 education as a site to engage children in the arts not just as a site of play, but as a tool for learning and understanding the world. The work of Lois Hetland, and Ellen Winner goes deeply into what the arts ACTUALLY teach. We need to retire the notion that people study the arts to make them better at other things. No. The arts teach very specific skills, attitudes, and inclinations. People study the arts because they are how civilizations image and explain themselves.
4. In an interview with Stonewall National Museum & Archives in 2020, you remarked: “[There is a] need for us to hold multiple ideas in our heads at the same time... Americans are not good at this, holding two things in our consciousness at the same time — it’s either all good or all bad... We ascribe evil to the object instead of ascribing evil to racism or misogyny.” Could you expand on this, and tell me how as an artist you grapple with this?
To be Black in America is to understand that you are living in a really amazing and vibrant country with tremendous resources and a great history and at the same time to know that as the descendant of an enslaved people you were never meant to survive here. I have held those two things in my consciousness about my home ever since I learned language. I love America. It’s my home. And I know the whole story about my home. Not just the parts that make me feel good or just the parts that make me feel bad. My knowledge about my home is not organized around my feelings. Facts don’t care how you feel.
Dale Carnegie extracted a tremendous amount of wealth out of the planet and out of people. He also paid for Carnegie Hall and the library down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn. Was he evil?
I also need to say, that the arts funding sector is subject to a kind of moral scrutiny that people would not be able to endure in their own lives. People think money comes from some magical place and that there is good money and bad money. And that somehow, cultural institutions should eschew “bad” money. It is easy to target these funders because cultural institutions are supposed to be morally pure so “bad” people shouldn’t be allowed to “wash” their evil by supporting culture. I don’t know where this gets us. Mostly because people don’t understand that in America, museums are private institutions.
But it is easier to get mad at museum trustees than it is to talk to your own parents about their support for antidemocratic policies.
5. In 2020 you had a show of new paintings at LaMontagne Gallery, Homage to the Auction Block. Ten percent of the gallery's proceeds were donated to The Black School. How might we normalize this practice and model for support?
Russell LaMontagne understood that the work in that show was in direct engagement with the history of enslavement in this country. To his credit, he educated himself about the work and understood my relationship to education as part of who I am as an artist. That goes back to what I was saying in the beginning — Russell educated himself. So when we came to a point were we wanted to have the show support an organization, he was completely prepared to engage with Shani Peters and the folks at The Black School.
May (I dare say all) collectors expect a discount on gallery purchases. This practice is so common that it is almost built into pricing at this point. I think if artists/gallerists decide to build a donation into their pricing that can go a long way into making this happen. Also, it has to be collaborative, with the gallerist allowing the artist to benefit from their charitable donation in a way that they cannot do with auctions.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how cultural and philanthropic leaders are re-envisioning the future of the arts.