African-American art

Steve's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including venues such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Techs, the Gallatin Galleries at NYU, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the ICA in Boston, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and more.

Steve has participated in many group exhibitions, including venues such as the Mass Art Museum, the school at the Jack Shaman Gallery, the Fruitlands Museum, the Mills Gallery in Boston, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard, the Longwood Art Gallery, the Dee Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Danforth Museum, amongst others.

He is in the collection of the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Mead Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art, and many more.

He's a recipient of many grants and awards, including the Paula Krasner Foundation Grant, the Rappaport Prize from the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the LAF Contemporary Work Fund Grant, the Art Matters Foundation Award, and Steve is a professor and MFA co-director in studio art at Hunter College in New York.

yeah,

kind of emerged into this more experimental African-American art scene, which I reference in the piece, chiefly through Kelly Jones's book, South of Pico.

And I kind of rely on that book for some of the more granular information about Hassinger's career during this period.

And is that when she joined or was it part of Studio Z? Is that where we're getting to here? Yeah.

And then there's another work, which is... documented in photographs um in the exhibition called flying where there was a kind of performance for 1982 exhibition afro-american abstraction where hasinger and some others kind of ventured out of the gallery into the ground surrounding the museum and this white clothing you know there's a television they're driving poles into the ground they're crawling along the ground so i think that in terms of um you know, the kind of racialized aspects of that collaboration, it is very much within an abstract and experimental vein.

It's not really about figuration per se.

It's more about the act of kind of being together and experimenting, whether in Studio Z or whether when she came to New York as well, you know, she was very involved in, institutions like just above midtown she did a residency at the studio museum in harlem a couple of years after david hammonds did in the early 1980s um so i think yeah biographically i think the the through line of dance is very important um but also i think ultimately she is an african-american artist who's working with non-figuration who's working with on depiction and i think uh, yeah, that, that sculptural abstraction is a very important point of, I guess, defiance against, um, you know, the desire to represent the black figure, which, you know, is, is, is especially prominent now, but also goes back to the eight, to the eighties and seventies as well.

And something that Kelly Jones talks about is, you know, this, this, these were kind of strategies of formal resistance to, to that desire as well.