IN THIS MOMENT: Artist Steve Locke
Beth and I recently chatted with Steve Locke about his show at LaMontagne Gallery, Homage to the Auction Block, his move to NY and life in this moment. Stay tuned for our virtual tour with Steve this fall, but in the meantime, contact us to arrange a private tour of the work at La Montagne (through August 14). Ten percent of the gallery's proceeds from the Auction Block series will be donated to The Black School.
We are quite taken with the work and with Steve … here’s some excerpts from our conversation this past week. Steve’s voice is in italics.
————————————
I love everything about Brooklyn…even the heat.
We love Brooklyn too, one of the best parts about NY, but we really fell for Steve’s energy and enthusiasm. He had us at hello. Steve said his formal introduction to Brooklyn was through the Patty Duke show, and within minutes into our call, Steve jingled, Patty’s only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights.
Born in Ohio, raised in Detroit, Michigan, Steve spent the last 35 years connected to Boston – Boston University (BA), Mass College of Art (BFA/MFA) and over the past five years before leaving Massachusetts, living and working out of his home base of Dedham. During this time, he left his mark on Boston, primarily through public art – the unforgettable Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner (2018) and Love Letter to a Library, Boston Public Library (2019). Steve was the City of Boston Artist in Residence in 2018. In the Fall of 2019, Steve joined the faculty of the Pratt Institute in New York.
While Steve admits he has had weird success in Boston, among his favorite memories are having people come to the studio and making a real connection with the work and getting asked weird ass stupid questions. This weirdness Steve injects is not weird at all, in fact he loves it and loves making it ok not to know everything or anything really about art. Steve describes the looking, asking and making connections as magical … the ability of art giving your life back to you.
Steve particularly loves the connection with collectors. Belying his stature as an artist (Steve has had numerous solo exhibits and projects including, there was no one left to blame, curated by Helen Molesworth for the ICA), Steve is modest and grateful for his success. I am always shocked that people want to live with my work, that they want to care for something I made. The basic humanness of Steve’s work is so important that he worries that people can get so separated from objects when collecting. The deciding factor in the exchange according to Steve is simple, do you like it? And important to Steve, maybe inseparable from liking the object, is liking the artist.
There is a lot to like about Steve. The Boston Public Library project evoked early, fond memories of reading and discovery and a quest to let the community know what was inside the ‘people’s palace’. In an article written at the time of the opening, Steve said, from the time I came to Boston back in 1980, the library, particularly the McKim Building, was a place of discovery, refuge, and solace. There, I learned about Sargent, met Andy Warhol, fell in love, and mourned loved ones. As I moved to various Boston neighborhoods, the branch libraries have allowed me to learn about my community and about myself as an artist and as a citizen. This project is my way of saying ‘thank you’ - to the library and its people for what they do for people like me every day.
Reading is an essential part of Steve’s practice, and while Steve sighed that the pandemic has made it impossible to read, Steve rattled off a handful of books he is re-reading – William Faulkner, Lynne Tillman and a book of poems my friend Linda gave me, Robin Coste Lewis’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus. Faulkner, Steve says is just right for this moment — all about action over words and The Voyage of Sable Venus appears as a literary companion to Homage to an Auction Block series. Titles matter as property and word choice and the word “apparition” appears in Lynne Tillman’s, Men and Apparitions: A Novel and one of Josef Alber’s most notable works, Homage to a Square: Apparition. Steve’s website gives a list of books and characters where I found myself. From Stephen King to James Baldwin, Steve shares books that have made him feel less alone in the world. It wasn't just reading about black people. I am black. They wrote characters that said the things that I thought and felt, that saw the world as I saw it. They wrote characters that had the same lives that I did. They wrote characters that were me. Because I saw myself in books, I could see a future for myself. Perhaps this is a glimpse of what Steve means about the ability of art giving your life back to you.
This brings us to the Homage to the Auction Block. Steve works at the intersection of portraiture, modernism, masculinity, and identity. He asks us to confront our American past, a past built on slavery, men and women who were stolen, sold and worked to death to create the wealth of a nation, our nation. With this particular work, Steve says he is thinking about how modernist idioms can and do contain racial history. If our wealth is built on slavery, so is modernism.
It’s hard to understand Homage to the Auction Block without a little background on the Auction Block Memorial, a highly praised and subsequently controversial project proposed while Steve was Boston’s Artist in Residence – a heartbreak that still reverberates. It was conceived as a public memorial at Boston’s Faneuil Hall acknowledging that profits from the slave trade helped fund the landmark. Peter Faneuil was a slave trader. Steve proposed to create a marker in the shape of the auction block to insert the living history of the enslavement into the historical narrative of Boston. Others sought to rename the building. The Mayor supported the proposal, the NAACP did not, and Steve withdrew. Folks at the Boston Branch of the NAACP and others said I was getting in the way of the conversation of race, so I got out of the way. And they still have yet to have a conversation.
Homage to the Auction Block is a homage to Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square. It follows the same simplicity – four progressively smaller squares within each other, each in a different color, all aligned closer to the bottom than top. By asking whether an artist can create space using only color relationships, Albers modernized painting and subverted the limits of two-dimensional space and played with perception. In Homage to the Auction Block, Steve adds to the inner neutral square the shape of the auction block. The basic modernist form is the auction block – because of this form other forms come into being. The work reframes the work of modernism around the shape that made it possible. Like America, modernism belongs to me. Black people bled and died for it. People say I am reclaiming or critiquing (Albers’s work), but no…it is an homage, love. We have his work because of what it means to be American, what it means to make things visible, to look at America.
The first in the series held more closely to the Auction Block Memorial, more sculptural and monochromatic like in the Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie, but the more I started to explore color and Albers, I started to think more experimentally. As I researched Albers more closely, I abandoned taped lines for painted ones. It gives the paintings humanity. The work is small but once I find space to work, it will grow…wait until they become 4 feet square. There are 16 paintings at LaMontagne Gallery, Steve has already created 50 in this ongoing series.
We asked Steve a little bit about his work process. When I am not teaching or prepping for class, I am making notes to myself. I schedule time to review my notes and get cracking. (Note: under Steve’s name on his website is, seemingly, his personal motto: “Laborare. Non arbitror.” Loosely translated: “Work; Don’t judge.”) I do yoga (very badly), workout, emails. Usually I would be working on daily portraiture but there are no people. I have lunch and paint.
We also asked Steve about interpretation of the work. His response was that you have everything you need. The object gives you color and shape and the titles are very intentional. Some of the titles double down on the message -- Homage to the Auction Block #30-here my troubles began, Homage to the Auction Block #31-…and here my troubles remain and #29-Atlantic are examples. Others seem more concerned with the emotion derived from the interplay of color and form, #28-daylight (imbued with yellows) and #42-solstice heat (radiating hot pink). I have a specific agenda. I want people to look at the work and get it. That is why I made it. I am an African American artist in dialogue with a German artist who fled Nazi Germany to protect the Jewish wife that he loved. I think this is important. Not just for me but for every artist.
The role of art is to give you back to yourself. Live in the world with me. Live in the beautiful messed up world with me.