Catheter Kiss: The Paintings of Hugh Steers, with Julie Heffernan, Dale Peck and James Smalls

Catheter Kiss: The Paintings of Hugh Steers celebrated Hugh Steers' prolific painting career and Visual AIDS' monograph Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983-1994. The evening's presenters included artist Julie Heffernan, writer Dale Peck, and art historian James Smalls, who read from their contributions to the monograph and personal reflections about Steers' art and life. Steers aimed for his work to embody a "soft glow of brutality" through his gorgeous renderings amidst the carnage of the AIDS crisis, exemplified by tender scenes such as the radiant couple embracing through medical apparatuses in his 1994 painting Catheter Kiss. The conversation between the evening's three participants will consider Steers in the studio, queer intimacy during the height of the AIDS crisis, and Steers' place in art history, among other themes.

Steers described his artistic perspective in an interview in September 1992: “I think I'm in the tradition of a certain kind of American artist—artists whose work embodies a certain gorgeous bleakness. Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline—they all had this austere beauty to them. They found beauty in the most brutal forms. I think that's what characterizes America, the atmosphere, its culture, its cities and landscape. They all have that soft glow of brutality.”

While embracing the polemics of identity politics through his visual content, Steers’ emotionally charged painting took a departure from the more didactic work of his peers. The last five years of his artistic practice focused on AIDS as a subject matter, drawing on community experience and mixing dreamlike allegory with figurative realism. The resulting images amplify issues of mortality and isolation, defiance and compassion. Hugh Steers’ artwork is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum.

Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983-1994 is the first monograph focused on the career of American figurative painter Hugh Steers (1962-1995), whose life was cut short by AIDS, at the age of 32. Committed to figurative painting at a time when it was out of favor with critics and collectors, Steers nonetheless gained appreciation for his expressionist-realist narratives of a life shadowed by isolation and mortality, yet infused with wry humor, camp, and what Steers himself called, a “gorgeous bleakness.” Unique among painters, Steers consciously brought AIDS, intimacy, and the body into the traditional vocabulary of painting.

Julie Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and represented by PPOW in New York City, Catharine Clark in San Francisco and Mark Moore in Los Angeles, CA. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts and Fullbright Fellowship, and she is a board member of the National Academy Museum in NYC. Heffernan received her MFA from Yale School of Art where she was Hugh Steers' Advanced Painting teacher; they developed a deep and abiding friendship that continued on through Hugh's illness and eventual death.

Dale Peck is the author of the novels Martin and John (1993), What We Lost (2004), and The Garden of Lost and Found (2012), as well as the essay collection Hatchet Jobs (2004) and the memoir Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS (2015). His 2009 novel, Sprout, was the winner of the inaugural Lambda Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. He lives with his husband in New York, where he teaches in the New School's Graduate Writing Program and is the editor in chief of the Evergreen Review.

James Smalls is professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and publication interests address the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexuality in the visual culture of nineteenth century Europe and in that of the black diaspora. He is the author of The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006) and Gay Art (2008).

Hugh Steers (1962–1995) was celebrated for his allegorical painting that captured the emotional and political tenor of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the impact of queer identity and the AIDS crisis. Born in Washington, D.C., Steers studied painting at Yale University, and pursued a commitment to figuration throughout his career, cut dramatically short by AIDS at the age of 32. Influenced by historical figures of art, including Thomas Eakins, Edward Hopper, Paul Cadmus, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, among others, he embraced representational painting and figuration at a time when such approaches were especially unfashionable.