Anita Steckel

Anita Steckel was an American feminist artist renowned for her paintings and photomontages featuring sexual imagery.

Biography of Anita Steckel

Anita Steckel was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating early from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan, she left home.

As a young, single woman, Steckel embarked on various adventures, including dating Marlon Brando and working aboard a Norwegian freighter on a two-month journey to South America. She also worked as a dance instructor.

Subsequently, she returned to New York, enrolling in studies at Cooper Union and Alfred University. Additionally, she completed advanced coursework at the Art Students League of New York.

For much of her life, she lived and worked in a studio in Greenwich Village. In 1970, Steckel relocated to Westbeth Artists' Housing in Manhattan, New York, where she resided until the end of her life.

Steckel gained public recognition following her solo exhibition titled "The Sexual Politics of Feminist Art," held at Rockland Community College in 1972.

Anita Steckel received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2005, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1983, and a MacDowell Fellowship in 1966.

Recent solo exhibitions of Steckel's artwork include "Lust" at WONNERTH DEJACO in Vienna (2023); "Anita Steckel: My Town" at Ortuzar Projects in New York (2022); "Anita Steckel: The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics" at Stanford Art Gallery in Stanford (2022); "Anita Steckel" at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles (2021), among others.

Anita Stecke's Art Style

Steckel was a prolific experimenter, exploring a wide range of mediums, including pencil, oil, silkscreen, Xerox, assemblage sculpture, and poetry. Her work served as an ongoing critique of the sexism in Western art history and the prevailing prudishness of postwar American society.

As an unapologetic New Yorker, feminist, and satirist, Steckel delved into the experiences of women in public spaces and the context of modernity within the 20th-century urban hub. Her most renowned pieces brought life to scenes of unconscious pleasure and play, skillfully intermingling subconscious landscapes of desire with the visible architectural realms.

Drawing inspiration from popular culture, politics, and her personal experiences, the artist cultivated her distinctively sardonic voice within the vibrant downtown scene of the 1950s and 60s. She engaged in a close dialogue with fellow collagists, including luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Ray Johnson, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes.