Locke has done projects with ForFreedoms, Kickstarter, the Boston Public Library, the Gardner Museum, and P.S. Satellites/Prospect IV in New Orleans and has had gallery exhibitions with yours mine & ours, Samsøñ, Gallery Kayafas, and Mendes Wood. His work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Art in America, Art New England, JUXTAPOZ, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker. Currently a Professor at Pratt Institute, Steve is a painter whose work lives at the intersections of portraiture, identity, and modernism. He uses painting’s ability to direct the gaze to help us look critically and unflinchingly at our shared history. His work can be seen at www.stevelocke.com
Ben Hall, Detroit-based artist and composer. He received his undergraduate degree from Bennington College where he focused on Quaker-based mediation and conflict resolution and studied drums with Milford Graves. Hall produces new American improvisation on his record labels brokenresearch and Ornette Coleman Fiend Club, including the last small group recordings of visionary trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon. His practice also includes curating Bap-tizum.com, the world’s largest online Black American spiritual collection.
Hall has written for The Wire and BOMB and was profiled in Fred Moten’s book Black and Blur (Consent not to be a single being). Hall contributed the essay “Face Changer” to BMCM+AC 2018 exhibition catalogue Between Form and Content: Perspectives on Jacob Lawrence and Black Mountain College. His upcoming exhibition 2021 exhibition at Essex Flowers is titled Jives n Gambles and focuses on the work of Philip Guston and William Faulkner as interlocutors of racism.