Steve Keister

About Steve Keister

Steve Keister (b. 1949, Lancaster, Pennsylvania) has consistently explored the body and physical form since arriving in New York in the 1970s. He haunted SoHo's streets and the industrial surplus stores on Manhattan's Canal Street for inexpensive materials to fabricate his work, typical of the “No-Wave” art movement. He first relied on Plexiglas shards and sidewalk discards to make futuristic, abstract sculptures and mobiles, before moving on to Spandex-covered sculptural suspensions, anticipating the work of Latin American constructivist and conceptualist artists, like Lygia Clark and Ernesto Neto.

During a serendipitous holiday in Isla Mujeres (Quintana Roo, Mexico), Keister jettisoned his artistic assumptions, recognizing that he was developing a lexicon of forms and shapes which were far more concrete and geometric. Like an urban archaeologist, Keister collects Styrofoam and molded-paper packaging materials discarded on New York’s streets and sidewalks and creates casts of those materials. Unlike Rachel Whiteread, who casts and interprets negative space, Keister recombines his ceramic and concrete casts to assemble sculptures that bear resemblance, but do not copy, Olmec, Mayan, Aztec and other Meso-American artifacts.

Keister’s focus on packaging materials also makes use of the Duchampian readymade prevalent in conceptual art. His dual references to Meso-American and contemporary North American cultures result in what he terms “interstitial archaeology,” a unique place between classic Olmec (2000-1000 BC) and today’s consumer cultures. His recent works are a commentary on both.

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