Kate Steciw

Kate Steciw employs sculpture, photography, video, and image manipulation in her thought-provoking works.

Biography of Kate Steciw

Kate Steciw was born in 1978 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Smith College in Northampton, receiving a BA in Sociology in 2000. Later, in 2003, she obtained an MFA in Photography from SAIC in Chicago.

Apart from her artistic career, Kate Steciw has taken on several teaching roles. She was a Mentor within the SVA Mentor Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 2013 to 2014. Since 2019, she has served as an Instructor/Mentor at Vantage Points in New York. 

Moreover, Steciw has worked as a Guest Lecturer/Critic at various institurions, including University of Ohio, The New School in New York, and Denison University.  

Her solo and two-person exhibitions include "Hard Measure" (with Pooneh Maghadeze) at Underdonk in Brooklyn (2023), "Incisor" at Gamma Gallery in Guadalajara (2018), "Kate Steciw" at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris (2016), "Fold and Unfold" (with Letha Wilson) at MACRO in Rome (2016), "Kate Steciw" at Retrospective in Hudson (2015), "Open For Business III" (with Rachel de Joode) at Neumeister Bar-Am in Berlin (2014), and many more.

Additionally, Kate Steciw's works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions held at various prestigious galleries and museums worldwide, including Garage in Rotterdam, Anat Egbi Gallery in Los Angeles, The Hole in New York, Rod Barton Gallery in London, Hauser and Wirth in New York, Vogt Gallery in New York, Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, Gregor Staiger Gallery in Zurich, among others.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Kate Steciw's Art Style

Kate Steciw transcends the boundaries of photography through her sculptural installations, showcasing the potential of digital processes to create entirely new mediums and visual languages. By manipulating images in Photoshop, she transforms both her own photographs and found stock imagery into abstract forms. 

Kate Steciw's art explores the shifting relationship between physical objects and their digital representations and distribution in the online age. Her background in commercial photo retouching (over 10 years!) informs her artistic process. She takes stock images of objects, manipulates them, and reassembles them into collages. This process removes the objects from their original commercial context and reimagines them as art pieces.

Steciw's focus on objects within the context of mass media and Web 2.0 aligns her work with the post-internet art movement.