Steve Locke received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2001. Extending his commitment to a painting practice, he 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 work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including: the fire next time, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2024); the daily practice of painting, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA (2022); 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, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (2018); Love Letter to a Library, 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, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2013), traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2014); and Rapture, curated by Erin Dziedzic, Hall Street Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA (2008). Locke has participated in many group exhibitions, including The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression, MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA (2023); Feedback, curated by Helen Molesworth, The School, Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY (2021); The BIG Picture: Giant Photographs and Powerful Portfolios, Fitchburg Art Museum, MA (2020); Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination, Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA (2020); Coded, curated by Alexandria Smith, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, MA (2018); Nine Moments for Now, curated by Dell Marie Hamilton, Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2018); Gay, curated by Ivan Monforte, Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx Council on the Arts, NY (2014); Paint Things: Beyond the Stretcher, curated by Evan Garza and Dina Deitsch, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2013); and Making a Mark, curated by Helen Shlien, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA (2002).

Locke’s works are in the collections of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA, among others.

He is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2022); 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 a Professor and MFA Co-Director in Studio Art at Hunter College in New York. He is also on the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023, Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist, a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalog essays, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize. Molesworth is a trustee of the Fine Arts Work Center.