Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings

Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings 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.

With his vulnerable subjects depicted in hospital rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms, Steers projected radical ideas about male intimacy, queer politics, fragility and healthcare that were difficult for Americans to face at the height of the AIDS crisis. In today’s more receptive light, Steers’ style, subject matter, and place in American art history is deserving of new consideration.

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.”

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.

This publication is part of Visual AIDS mission to preserves and honors the work of under-recognized artists lost to AIDS and cultural contributions of the AIDS movement.

Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings features over 600 full-color images of Steers’ paintings on canvas and paper. The hard cover book includes a preface by Nelson Santos, forward by Dale Peck and essays by Cynthia Carr and James Smalls. Designed by Bethany Johns. Managed by Dancing Foxes Press. Published by Visual AIDS.

Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings

November 2015

256 pages
630 color images
8.5" x 11”
Hardcover
Published by Visual AIDS
ISBN: 978-0-9678425-6-1

Out of stock

Cynthia Carr is the author of three books, most recently Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012). Her previous books are Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (2006) and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (1993). Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists as Village Voice writer (with the byline C. Carr) in the 1980s and 1990s. Her work has also appeared in Artforum, the New York Times, TDR: The Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

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.

Nelson Santos is the Executive Director of Visual AIDS. He as work on previous Visual AIDS publications, including Robert Blanchon, Not Over: 25 Years of Visual AIDS, DUETS, and several exhibition catalogues.

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).