Steve Locke: I said what I said (signed pre-orders)

Books will ship in March of 2026

The first career monograph of American artist Steve Locke (b. 1963) captures the
absurdity, curiosity, desire and rage that define historical and contemporary American consciousness and its legacies of discrimination, racial violence and spectacle. Working in painting, drawing, installation and public art, Locke’s work brings to light our dark past and present, looking closely at America’s history of discrimination and modernism. For three decades, Locke has engaged intensely with issues of race, color, identity, same-sex desire, violence, and memory, often revealing as much tenderness and humor as he does brutality. Largely working in portraiture, Locke’s artistic practice in recent years has extended to public art and conceptual engagements with color and form, as with his ongoing painting series Homage to the Auction Block, which uses Josef Albers’s formal language to introduce race to questions of color theory.
Steve Locke’s forthcoming monograph, organized by MASS MoCA, explores the New York-based painter’s decades-long career in painting, drawing, installation, freestanding painting, public art, and the written word. Edited with text by MASS MoCA curator Evan Garza, Locke’s career monograph will feature an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als, scholarly essays by Robert Storr, Dr. Kymberly Pinder, Dr. Karen Kurczynski, and artist Craig Drennen, and will include an in-depth interview with the artist and Helen Molesworth. The monograph will be published on the heels of Locke’s groundbreaking MASS MoCA solo exhibition, the fire next time, recently selected as a Top Ten pick in Artforum’s Best of 2024, and whose title is taken from James Baldwin’s groundbreaking book of essays first published in 1963 amid the growing civil rights movement.

Edited with text by Evan Garza  Introduction by Hilton Als

Contributors:  Craig Drennen, Karen Kurczynski, Kymberly Pinder, Robert Storr.

Interview by Helen Molesworth  
DelMonico Books, March 2026 Hardcover, 9.5 x 11 in. / 256 pgs / 170 color.