I Said What I Said: Steve Locke and Evan Garza in Conversation

Join us on Friday, March 20, at 6 pm for a conversation with acclaimed American artist and MassArt alumnus Steve Locke BFA ‘97, MFA ‘01, H'22 as we celebrate the launch of his first career monograph (MASS MoCA/DelMonico Books), edited with text by MASS MoCA curator Evan Garza.

The conversation will take place in the Tower Auditorium at MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, followed by a book signing in the West Tower Lobby Gallery. Free and open to the public. Copies of Steve Locke: I Said What I Said will be available for purchase after the talk.

Steve Locke: I Said What I Said explores three decades of Locke’s career and grew out of their recent exhibition, Steve Locke: the fire next time at MASS MoCA (Aug 2024–Nov 2025), selected among the Top Ten in Artforum’s Best of 2024. The two will discuss Locke’s bodies of work featured in the monograph and the artist’s career-long conceptual exploration of portraiture, perceptions of the male figure, and themes of modernism and racial violence.

Working in painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, and public art, Locke brings to light our dark past and present, looking closely at America’s history of racial violence and spectacle. In his interdisciplinary practice, Locke engages issues of identity, desire, race, violence, and memory, revealing as much tenderness and humor as he does brutality. 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.

(b.1963, Cleveland, OH) lives and works in the Hudson Valley and New York City. He earned his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he taught for more than 20 years. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from MassArt in 2022. Locke has been the subject of solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2024); Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech (2022); The Gallatin Galleries, New York University (2019); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2018); Boston Public Library (2018); Bard College at Simon’s Rock (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2014); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2013).

Evan Garza is a writer, Fulbrighter, and curator at MASS MoCA. Previously, Garza was one of six fellows in the museum’s Curatorial Exchange Initiative (CEI) program, for which they curated the exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time (2024). Before arriving at MASS MoCA, Garza was a Fulbright Scholar at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and served as Artistic Director of the 2021 Texas Biennial. Garza edited the forthcoming career monograph, Steve Locke: I Said What I Said, co-published by DelMonico Books and MASS MoCA (March 17, 2026). Garza earned their M.A. from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute.

Photo Credit: Taylor Miller. Book design: Amy Chen.

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