Background
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, raised in Detroit, Michigan and is currently living and working in Boston, Massachusetts where he teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
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Steve Locke
Edit ProfileEducation
Locke spent the Summer of 2002 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2001 and holds Bachelor"s degrees from Boston University and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Career
Locke’s art explores the meaning applied to male portraiture. "lieutenant’s hard to make a painting of a man and not have him look important. So I came up with this weird gesture," Steve Locke explained in an interview with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
"I like that they’re not heroic, and not attached to any body," he said of his pieces, which straddle the line between sculpture and painting.
"They’re floating around in the atmosphere, waiting to possess somebody, or get inside your head and transform you." He aims to "make paintings of men who were vulnerable, or exposed, without using the obvious trope of nudity." His work provokes broader social, sexual and art historical conversations. He currently teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Locke was awarded the Art Matters grant, visiting Istanbul to see the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia with a specific interest in exploring themes such as patterning, decoration, calligraphy, and wall painting in 2007. In 2008, he was the visiting professor and artist in residence at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
He has been in several group exhibitions including superSalon at Samsøñ Projects in Boston, Master of Arts (2004) White Boys, curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan, at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery Haverford College (2013), and Recent Acquisitions at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art New York (2013).
He was awarded the Pollock-Krasner award in 2014. He is represented by Samsøñ Projects in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Quotations: "I like that they’re not heroic, and not attached to any body,".
