Hand-drawn portraits of murderers, sculpture, paintings, and an installation entitled 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) – all of these help comprise the newly-opened exhibition of alum Steve Locke (MFA 2001) at Mass MoCa. 

Called the fire next time, a title borrowed from a 1963 James Baldwin book on the then-emerging Civil Rights movement, Locke’s interdisciplinary art in this exhibition meditates, as it often does, on issues of identity, desire, race, violence, and memory. Within his work lies the unlikely emotional mix of tenderness, humor, and brutality. 

A trailblazer in his artistic space, Locke has had exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and many other venues, and his works are in the collections of esteemed institutions including the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. To say that his work resonates with a rapt public is an understatement.

Locke’s latest exhibition will run at MASS MoCa, in North Adams, through November 16, 2025