Join us for a conversation with artist Steve Locke and scholar Robert Reid-Pharr, moderated by curator Evan Garza, on Wednesday, November 11, at 6:30 PM (ET) at Alexander Gray Associates, New York. In celebration of Steve Locke's first career monograph Steve Locke: I Said What I Said and organized on the occasion of Locke's exhibition I said what I said (October 30 to December 12, 2026), the discussion will explore Locke’s interdisciplinary practice and his engagement with portraiture, desire, race, and memory. Working across painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, and public art, Locke examines the histories of racial violence, anti-Blackness, and the Western art historical canon, revealing the tensions between brutality, tenderness, and humor that shape his work.
Steve Locke (b.1963) was born in Cleveland, OH and lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to interrogate the connections between desire, identity, and violence. His reevaluation of portraiture pushes viewers to confront and critically engage with a complicated present and painful past.
Evan Garza is a contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, and Curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. They recently edited Steve Locke: I Said What I Said, the artist’s first career monograph, published in March 2026 by DelMonico Books and MASS MoCA. Recent honors include a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency, a Fulbright Scholarship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), and curatorial grants from Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation. Garza has held curatorial and institutional leadership roles at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now SMFA at Tufts). Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQIA2S+ artists. They earned their M.A. from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute.
Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His books include: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique, 2016; Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, 2007; Black Gay Man: Essays, 2001; and Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American,1999. His essays have appeared in The Minnesota Review; Humanities Magazine; Texte Zur Kunst; James Baldwin Review; Callaloo; Art in America; American Literary History; American Literature; Small Axe; The Chronicle of Higher Education; Social Text; Transition; Studies in the Novel; and the African American Review, among many other places. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from Yale University as well as a B.A. (with honors) in Political Science from UNC, Chapel Hill. He has been the Cloud Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.
