Steve Locke's solo exhibition, the fire next time at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, will be on view from August 3, 2024–November 8, 2025.
MASS MoCA's press release follows:
New York-based artist Steve Locke’s exhibition the fire next time is a meditation on uniquely American forms of violence directed at Black and queer people. In his interdisciplinary practice, Locke engages issues of identity, desire, race, violence, and memory, revealing as much tenderness and humor as he does brutality. Over the course of his decades-long career, Locke has largely worked in painting. Primarily concerned with how we ascribe meaning to portraiture while exploring the relationships between and among men, in recent years Locke has introduced a more personal, political, and critical engagement with histories of racism and anti-Blackness, the Western canon of art history, and American society. the fire next time takes its title from a book by James Baldwin, first published in 1963 amid the growing civil rights movement. Locke’s exhibition includes a MASS MoCA-commissioned sculptural installation; a new series of freestanding paintings; #Killers (2017-ongoing), a series of hand-drawn portraits of American mass murderers and accused or acquitted killers; and a data-driven site-specific installation, A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans Who Were Killed By Police or Who Died in Police Custody During My Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015 (2016), among other new and recent works.
