Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Anger is not market-friendly so you have to admire the artist who doesn’t hide it. The late, great Pope.L utilized his well, turning it inward with performance pieces that were ridiculous, painful and affecting, all while calling himself the “friendliest Black artist in America.” “You can almost hear the sneer in that slogan,” Martha Schwendener observed wisely.
Steve Locke may not share that same anger, exactly, but he possesses Pope.L’s same flair for the provocative. In 2019 he withdrew his proposal to install a memorial slave auction block at Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace because the NAACP opposed the public art project. For the press release on the occasion of his new show at Mass MoCA, he offers “the fire next time,” saying he’s “never really been interested in trauma” and adding that “the work of healing is not mine to do.”
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The show takes its name from James Baldwin’s polemic. Much of it collects work that follows Locke’s recurring motif from the last two decades, focused on floating or suspended heads. Though these often appear with tongues sticking out, it would be a mistake to reduce these to simple commentaries on lynching as Locke seems to be investigating, too, the whole practice of portraiture. The conceptual is always as strong as the political in these works. More prosaic is his 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), which features the names of such victims under an ominous neon sign that reads “a dream” in purple sans serif font.
The show is admirable for the degree to which it bucks subtlety. Also on display are graphite drawings from his “#Killer” series, including George Zimmerman (vacation selfie) (2018) and Lawrence Russell Brewer (death row) (2017). You may not recognize that second name, but Google and you’ll find a horrific hate crime associated with it. This is part of the project, but don’t forget that conceptual element because the heads float on the page, conjuring perhaps the doodles of someone enamored with a crush. But they only ever take up a small portion of the page. The whiteness is overwhelming.
Some of the best pieces are also the newest. There’s an installation commissioned by Mass MoCA that features bright metal wall pieces and accompanying works, signs 1-6 (2024), that continue these studies in three dimensions, with hanging satyr heads painted garishly and attacked with eye hooks as they hang inverted from industrial pipes. Locke has said these heads might serve as his doppelganger, and they do have a strange dignity about them. You have to admire the way this artist manages to turn his difficult subject matter completely upside down.
“Steve Locke: the fire next time” is on view at MASS MoCA through November 2025.
