MASS MoCA presents the first exhibition from the Curatorial Exchange Initiative by artist Steve Locke
North Adams— Now through November 2025, MASS MoCA presents “the fire next time,” the first exhibition from the Curatorial Exchange Initiative by artist Steve Locke.
Curated by CEI Fellow Evan Garza, “the fire next time” is a meditation on uniquely American forms of violence directed at Black and queer people. Locke’s interdisciplinary practice engages issues of identity, desire, race, violence, spectacle, and memory. In the artist’s hands, these complexities reveal as much tenderness and humor as they do brutality.
For most of his decades-long career, Locke has largely worked in portraiture, though recently he has pushed the discipline of painting to its material and conceptual limits through the creation of “freestanding paintings” and works of public art. This exhibition combines both new and recent works that introduce an increasingly personal, political, and critical engagement with histories of racism, anti-Blackness, modernism, and both the Western art historical canon and American society at large.
“I have never really been interested in trauma, to be completely honest with you,” explains Locke. “I have been interested in justice… the work of healing is not mine to do. My work is to make you look, and to make you unable to look away.” “the fire next time” takes its title from the 1963 book by American author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, which galvanized the American public with its brutal honesty about racial inequality.
The exhibit runs now through November 2025 at MASS MoCA on MASS MoCA Way in North Adams. More information can be found online.
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