STEVE LOCKE HAS A LOT TO SAY. PAY ATTENTION.

Words David Ebony Photography Guzman

Published in No 19

“Let’s meet at Willa’s,” was a text message I received from artist Steve Locke as I entered the parking lot of Foreland, the red brick behemoth of a building in Catskill, New York, where I was to interview him. Foreland was once a factory for the manufacture of Union soldier’s uniforms during the Civil War and, in a way, it served as the perfect setting for some of the hot-button socio-political conflicts that Locke and I discussed.

Today, the renovated and modernized Civil War-era complex is home to Willa’s coffee shop, plus other commercial venues. Some spaces are used for cultural events, and others are occupied by art galleries, and artists’ studios, including Locke’s. As I entered, Locke greeted me with an easy smile and a twinkle in his eye; he introduced me to George, his beloved female miniature schnauzer, who I would soon learn is a central figure in Locke’s life. The immediately friendly, gentle demeanor and lighthearted tone of the artist contrasts with the themes of violence against Black and gay people that permeate much of his art. After a coffee, a Danish, and some get-acquainted banter, Locke is relaxed and ready for the interview. I think he’s done this before.  

On an upper floor of the building, Locke’s sprawling studio space is filled with brilliant light streaming through the tall windows. Scattered here and there are numerous art works in progress — paintings, sculptures, and combinations thereof, at first glance somewhat reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines of the 1960s, and the more recent makeshift assemblage works of Isa Genzken, who, I later learned, is a favorite of Locke’s. Filling one wall are rows of medium-size portraits — imaginatively rendered heads of male figures of various races and ages — with brightly colored monochrome backgrounds. Most of these personages look straight ahead and stick their tongues out at the viewer. The irreverent gesture, uncommon in conventional portraiture, has both an oral-erotic connotation, and, according to the artist, a more cerebral one, referring to the nature of language; specifically, the relationship between speech and art as a visual language.

On another wall, several portraits of men hang next to small, wholly abstract, hard-edge, geometric compositions in brilliant colors. These paintings are part of his ongoing Homage to the Auction Block series that is at once a sincere homage to the Bauhaus pioneer and color theorist Josef Albers, and a scathing critique of slavery and its woefully still-reverberating legacy in the U.S.  The works equate, in a deliberately provocative way, art sales and human trafficking. Most of the works in progress in the studio are in preparation for the fire next time, a major solo exhibition of Locke’s work on view this fall at MASS MoCA. Alluding to the title of the landmark James Baldwin 1963 book, Locke’s exhibition is billed as “a meditation on uniquely American forms of violence against Black and queer people.”  

As we walked through the studio space, Locke had a graceful way of discussing mundane things interwoven with very difficult and sensitive matters, such as notions of identity, and the situation that minorities find themselves in the Unites States today. “The relationship between America and Black people has always been about violence,” he stated, “particularly violence in the service of wealth. When you think about being a Black person in the art world, you wonder, why are collectors buying the work? Is it because they like it, they respond to it, or is it a way of owning ‘Blackness.’ And that is a dilemma that every Black artist must deal with — or not deal with — in their own way. I never shy away from it. I knew it was about commerce and I never had a problem with that. I also knew that I wasn’t making work where I was selling my identity. I want to believe that my work resonates with people regardless of my identity.”  

The homoerotic content in Locke’s works is evident in many pieces, but subtle in the extreme. “I like men, and I like to look at them,” he noted. “As an artist, I don’t have anything to say about women in my work, but I am able to address the way men are together, and the violence that is at the heart of masculinity. Gay men might be okay for now, but I actually think that straight men are struggling right now.” He connects many of his recent themes to James Baldwin’s book. The Fire Next Time a two-part non-fiction work — the first part is a letter to his nephew, and the second part is about his relationship with the church as a gay man. “The ideas of shame and hiding, and not being good enough, that are engrained in the way Black people are spoken about, I thought would have changed over the course of my lifetime, but they haven’t. The amount of hatred many people have toward women and gay people now is absolutely terrifying. What I can do as an artist is just get people to pay attention. If we can just pay attention, we just might make it through this awful period.”

We spoke about everyday life in the mid-Hudson Valley, where Locke resides for part of the year when he is not in his Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment in Brooklyn, New York. He currently lives across the river from Catskill in what is little more than a fisherman’s shack in Hudson, technically Greenport. It has about an acre of land and a nondescript ranch house that is, according to Locke, in desperate need of attention. He plans to redo the whole place when he can. And we also spoke about his background. “My childhood was kind of awful,” he said. “I don’t have any nostalgia about it. I did, however, have a very profound relationship with the Detroit Institute of Arts. I used to skip school and go to that museum. It was heaven. Back then, no one cared if an eleven or twelve-year-old kid was wandering around the museum alone. So, I had the whole place to myself. Works by Van Gogh and Matisse in the collection are still etched in my brain. I realized early on that being an artist was a job that people had — something that people did. And it was amazing to me that people would make these paintings and objects and there would be a whole building built to preserve them.

I loved Detroit growing up. They used to call Detroit the Paris of the Midwest. My family was not really interested in art. My father died when I was ten, but my mom encouraged me. When she found out that I was skipping school to go to the museum, she said, ‘I’ll take you there any time you want to go, but you’re not allowed to skip school.’ My parents had a hard life. There’s no charm in being poor. My mom encouraged me, but she told me that I couldn’t’ go to school to be an artist. ‘You need to go to school to get an education in something else,’ she said. She died in 2004. She encouraged me to be myself, and that’s a great thing. I still love her. 

I graduated from high school when I was just 16. I applied to a lot of colleges and got accepted to Boston University. It was the furthest away from home that I could, so I went there. I studied business administration, but I took a class on American art, with Patricia Hill, the foremost Jacob Lawrence expert. It changed my life. It made me say, I think I can do this. I think I can be an artist. That’s really what started it all. I worked as a secretary for a long time to earn money to go to an art school. I wanted to study with Emma Amos at Rutgers University but wound up at MassArt [Massachusetts Institute of Art] just because I could afford it. I loved it there.”

Locke is one of the few artists who gracefully navigates the worlds of abstraction and figuration. He had a rigorous technical training in college, starting with Albers’ color exercises; abstraction for Locke was never about Abstraction Expressionism. Instead, he felt geometric abstraction was a way of understanding the world. “Like Cézanne’s world — the point, the plane, the line, the sphere — everything in the world was abstract to me,” he remarked. “I look at the world as a series of abstract gestures — purely from a formal understanding because that was the way I was trained. When I went into portrait painting, I approached it the same way. My teachers admired the British artists Euan Uglo, and William Coldstream, with their ideas of measurement — breaking down the figure to abstract components. That’s not to say my portraiture is unemotional, uncaring, unfeeling, or cold, or anything like that. That was just my training — how to make an image. My freestanding pieces encompass hardedge, abstract elements that I love. The world we live in can be perceived in abstract terms. You walk past a bright red Coke machine or a white wall in a store; that’s about as abstract as life can get right there. “

Eventually, Locke took a teaching job at Pratt institute, in New York City, in 2020. Then COVID hit. He spent the next two years in isolation in a strange new home and an unfamiliar city. A big break came in his career in the following year, however, when former ICA Boston chief curator Helen Molesworth featured his work in a group show called Feedback, at Jack Shainman’s venue, The School, in Kinderhook, New York. She hung twenty of Locke’s Homage to the Auction Block paintings, scattered throughout the show, plus a neon work at the entrance. Soon after, he joined the stable of Alexander Gray, which was and is his favorite New York gallery, now with a branch in Germantown.    

Today, living with George in the Hudson Valley, Locke seems content with a pleasurable and constructive daily routine. “I wake up with a miniature schnauzer standing on my head at 7AM,” he notes. “She stands on my face. Then we go for a walk. We go back to bed, and then I do physical therapy, and sometimes we go for a longer walk to Olana. I watch way too much news! We do the New York Times crossword puzzle and have breakfast. Then we head to the studio.” There, he finds new ways to get people to pay attention to the injustices and the unchecked animosities and hostilities that could ruin someone’s tomorrow.

 The Fire Next Time, Steve Locke’s solo exhibit, is on view through November 2025 at MASS MoCA.

Locke is represented by the Alexander Gray Gallery.

David Ebony is a contributing editor of Art in America. He is the author of the column “David Ebony and Art Books” for Yale University Press online, as well as numerous artist monographs including, most recently, Larry Poons (Abbeville Press), and Stephen Antonakos: Neon and Geometry, (Rizzoli), both 2023. @davidebony        

Guzman are regular contributors to UD. Veronique-Peres-Domergue.net @lesguzman