Steve Locke’s best-known works are paintings of faces with their tongues sticking out. This fatuous facial gesture is immediately relatable but also, as Locke discusses below, one that can be read in a number of different ways. Such multifaceted readings are typical for Locke, who trained as a painter and considers his subjects carefully and from many different vantages. Often, in work that can be moving or maddening, inspiring or impish, and sometimes more than a little funny, he captures stark realities related to the violence that has haunted Black and queer people.
The 61-year-old artist, long based in Boston but now living and working in New York, was the subject of “the fire next time,” a survey on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, until November 8. The show—whose title alludes to James Baldwin’s 1963 book of essays—included paintings, some of them freestanding portraits with tongues sticking out attached to poles and made to look like signposts. It also featured drawings from “#killers”(2017–ongoing), a series of portraits of racially motivated murderers; a newly commissioned set of sculptures of a faun’s head; and 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). That last work is a room-size installation that lists the names of 262 deceased men and women next to a neon sign that reads a dream, invoking a poem by Langston Hughes. Below, Locke discusses his restless and searching approach to portraiture, portraying whiteness and violence without resorting to spectacle, and wanting people to pay attention to crises happening all around them.
How did you start your series of “tongue paintings” (2004–ongoing)?
When I first started painting them, I was thinking about making portraits when there was this thing called “photography.” It seemed strange to be painting straight portraiture in a time of the camera. The camera does portraiture so much better than painting can, and with painted portraiture, you start to get into this whole emotional thing about the painter, which is not what portraiture is [supposed to be] about. Portraiture is about the sitter, not the painter.
Still, I was struggling with giving up straight or neutral portraiture, so I started thinking about the genre’s history, which mostly involves men and images of power: like a picture of the king on money, or a portrait of Jesus high on the wall of a classroom when I was a kid. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the portrait was up there because it had glass in front of it, so the nuns could see what we were doing while their backs were turned. All my life, I thought it was up there because nothing was higher than Jesus. But I realized it was a tool of surveillance.
Steve Locke: leave by day, 2022.
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York/ Steve Locke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
What drew you to tongues specifically?
If you look to art history, there are people sticking their tongues out everywhere. Once you start seeing them, you see them all over. I started to wonder, What does this gesture mean? It could be a way of being inappropriate or of making a face at someone. Or maybe what you have to say can’t fit inside your mouth. Focusing on tongues started out as a way to push myself past traditional portraiture. But then I really started to think about the implications: it relates to language. It’s sort of sexual, sort of gross, sort of funny. It also goes back to Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570s), with Marsyas upside-down with his tongue hanging out. It goes back to my love of art history, and all these sorts of things that happen in paintings, because things happen in paintings that can’t happen anywhere else.
What most drew you to James Baldwin for the title of your show?
We live in such a fraught time, and I don’t think anybody in American letters warned Americans more about America than James Baldwin. He was like, Here’s the problem: we’re sitting around pretending that we’re not related to each other, and it’s too expensive for us to love each other. But if we don’t start to love each other, we’re going to destroy each other. That has become very clear in American life right now, probably more than at any other time I’ve been alive—and I was born during segregation. The warning signs are all there about what is happening in American life: hatred of women, violence against Black people. It’s almost like an orgy of violence against Black people.
The MASS MoCA show is an exploration of different kinds of warnings. We’re in a place where we’re looking at Black people as if they’re not human, as if they’re abstractions. You hear people talk about “the Black body” like it’s an abstract thing, but no—they’re not Black bodies, they’re people. Baldwin presciently said we have to live together—not just exist together but live together, like we’re related, like we’re of the same family.
How did you conceive of your series “#killers,” and what made you situate your drawings in so much negative space?
The “#killers” series is an ongoing project. I think I’m up to about 63 drawings now. I’m trying to get to 100, but it’s taking me much longer than I anticipated because it’s such a difficult thing to do. Did you ever see the movie Jerry Maguire (1996)? There’s a conceit in that film that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a star football player. He’s obnoxious. Everybody hates him. It’s not until he is almost killed on the football field that people actually love him.
I have long had this feeling that America loves everything about Black culture except actual Black people. When I was thinking about “#killers,” I was thinking about what happened to people like Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, who were killed in the most brutal, demoralizing ways and then became avatars or spirits. I don’t think we need to convey nobility on murdered people, because they were already noble. There’s nothing I can do with a paintbrush that’s going to be more noble than Freddie Gray was to the people who cared about him. The idea that, in death, they are somehow more holy seemed obscene to me. It’s like dead Black people are better than living Black people.
Steve Locke: Officer Darren Wilson (hospital)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York/ Steve Locke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
That started me thinking about how [killers] are consigned to a basic level of evil—like, “Oh, they’re just evil, that’s why they do it.” No, they don’t do it because they’re evil. They do it because of racism. They do it because of the idea that one group of people is better than another group of people. When I started working on “#killers,” I began with a drawing of Dylann Roof. I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it, and it was a very bad drawing. Finally, I said to myself, “If I’m going to do this, I have to draw Dylann Roof with as much sympathy and compassion as I possibly can.” I stopped looking at these people as evil, and looked at them the way the state looks at them, as just killers. Because there were so many hashtags about different people who have been murdered, I wanted to put the focus on the cause of people being killed. There’s so much white space [in the graphite drawings] because it is the constitution of whiteness that makes this kind of violence possible. The wholesale engulfing of the myth of white superiority is what makes that kind of violence. You can’t kill somebody like that unless they’re not human to you.
The show includes a series of new sculptures of faun heads that hang from the ceiling. How did you arrive upon those as a form?
In 2017 I did a show called “The School of Love” [at Samsøñ Projects in Boston], which was about my coming out as gay and how I didn’t have any education in terms of how to have a relationship as a gay person. There was no role model for me, so I ended up finding role models wherever I could.
In that show, I made sculptures [modeled from] the head of a faun. I had found the faun in an antique shop. When I brought it up to the front, the lady at the shop said, “I don’t mean to be weird or anything, but that kind of looks like you.” So it became my avatar in “The School of Love.” Years later, when
I started thinking about this new show, I was thinking about the danger and the violence that’s inflicted on people, not just me but everyone. The faun heads in the MASS MoCA show are all hanging, so they start to feel a little bit less like people and more like trophies, or symbols, or signs. I did that because there’s something about seeing the body in distress that is exciting for people, especially when it’s Black people in distress. Like the Cuba Gooding Jr. thing—we really love him now that he’s injured. But if I take out the racial dynamics [and swap in a faun], it becomes more about the viewer, and then people start to have a sympathetic relationship with their own body. That’s the thing about violence: If it’s happening to someone else, maybe they deserve it. But if it’s happening to me, then it’s a problem.
Steve Locke: Student #51, 2016.
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York/ Steve Locke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
That can be seen in some of the adornments you affixed to the heads. Can you tell me about those?
Some have nails. Some have hooks. One has dog tags hanging from it. One has scales: they’re meat scales. I went on eBay one night and bought all the meat scales I could find. I wanted to talk about commerce and exchange, but I didn’t want to be ham-handed … we feel value through weight. The nails are a reference to nkisi power figures from West Africa: everyone in the community comes and brings a nail with a prayer or problem, then drives it into a wooden figure. The figure becomes the carrier of all those things.
You depict violence very differently in A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans Who Were Killed by Police or Who Died in Police Custody… Tell us about that work.
A lot of my earlier work dealt with the losses from the era of AIDS, which seems so long ago and so recent at the same time. Then, around when Michael Brown and Tamir Rice were killed [in 2014], a shift came about in the way I was thinking about both the world and my work. I was on sabbatical from teaching and had come back from a trip when, in an airport, I saw Eric Garner being murdered on television, over and over again on a loop. I wondered, When did it become OK to show Black people being killed on TV?
While I was on sabbatical, people kept saying to me, “Oh, that’s so great! It’s such a great time to be on sabbatical!” And I thought, Are you serious? Do you not see what’s going on?! Cops don’t keep statistics on who they shoot, but other groups were compiling statistics and posting them online. So I took a year and got [262] names, which are on the wall with the date, age, gender, location, and [cause of death]. I had a sign fabricated in blue neon, sort of like police-blue, that says a dream, from a line in the 1951 Langston Hughes poem “Harlem” that reads “what happens to a dream deferred?” I got sick of people asking me what I had done on my sabbatical with all these other people being murdered. It boggled my mind that so many people were blissfully unaware that Black people were being murdered with impunity.
