| Steve
Poleskie (1924 - )
Born: 1924 in New York
Studied: Cooper Union
Awards: Prix
de Rome Fellowship, 1954-57; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1958, 1961;
First Prize, Society of American Graphic Artist, 1962.
Positions: Yale University, Pratt Institute and Pratt Graphics Center.
Artist and writer Stephen (Steve) Poleskie was born in Pringle,
PA in 1938. The son of a high school teacher, Poleskie graduated
from Wilkes College in 1959 with a degree in Economics. A self-taught
artist, Poleskie had his first one-person show at the Everhart
Museum, Scranton, PA in 1958, while still in college. These works
were largely abstract expressionistic in nature. After graduation
Poleskie was employed briefly as an insurance agent and commercial
artist, before moving to Miami where he worked in a screen-printing
shop. After three months he left for the Bahamas and Cuba. His
next job was as an art teacher at Gettysburg High School where
David Eisenhower was one of his students. During this time he
exhibited at the Duo Gallery in New York, and the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Leaving Gettysburg, he
traveled to Mexico and California, returning via Canada, before
taking a studio on 10th Street in New York City. Poleskie enrolled
in art classes at the New School and studied for a term with
Raphael Soyer. The two became friends, and Soyer painted several
paintings of his former student. At the time, Poleskie was doing
figurative work. When he had his first one-person show at Morris
Gallery, Soyer bought a painting. Morris later sold a large Poleskie
to the playwright Lanford Wilson. Living on 10th Street, which
then was the art center of New York, Poleskie became friends
with many of the artists and critics of the day including, Elaine
and Willem deKooning, Frank O’Hara, and Louise Nevelson.
In 1963 Poleskie opened a screen-printing studio in a storefront
on East 11th Street. This became Chiron Press, the first fine-art
screen-printing shop in New York. The business was soon moved
to larger quarters at 76 Jefferson Street. During the five years
he ran the operation the names of the artists who had prints
made at Chiron Press reads like a who’s who of the artists
of the 60s and includes such figures as Robert Rauschenberg,
Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Robert
Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. One of the printers at Chiron
Press was the young artist Brice Marden. Poleskie’s own
prints from this time, rather minimal landscapes, the people
of the earlier works had walked out of the picture, were purchased
by numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum, and the
Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the National Collection
in Washington, D. C. In 1968, wanting more time to devote to
his own art, Poleskie sold Chiron Press and accepted a teaching
position at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. It was here that
he developed his Aerial Theater, a unique art form for which
he is best known. In Aerial Theater, Poleskie flew an aerobatic
biplane, trailing smoke, through a series of maneuvers to create
a four-dimensional design in the sky. Musicians, dancers, and
sometime parachutists often accompanied these pieces. This work
was very popular in Europe, especially Italy, where Poleskie
lived on and off for over three years. Italian art critic Enrico
Crispolti called Aerial Theater the logical extension of Futurism,
and the French art critic Pierre Restany, writing in D’ars
dubbed it “Planetary Art” on the scale with Christo’s
installations. Poleskie’s biplane and drawings for various
performances were exhibited at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in
New York in 1978.
Twenty years later, in 1998, having reached
the age of sixty, and feeling his body could no longer take the
excessive G forces imposed on it by the aerobatic maneuvers,
Poleskie ceased flying altogether, and sold his airplanes. Works
on paper from his Aerial Theater period are in many public collections
including the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery
in London; and the Castlevecchio in Verona. Poleskie’s
work has been exhibited widely. Among the cities he has had his
work shown, or done performances, are New York, Boston, Washington
D. C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Toledo, Richmond,
Williamsburg, San Antonio, and Miami, in the USA; London, Southampton,
Loughborough, and the Isle of Wight in the UK; Rome, Milan, Bologna,
Brescia, Como, Trento, Turin, Verona, and Palermo in Italy; Munich,
Stuttgart, and Kassel, in Germany; Linz in Austria; Ljubljana,
Zagreb, and Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia; Moscow and Saint
Petersburg in Russia; Warsaw, Gdansk, and Lodz, in Poland; Tiblisi
in the Republic of Georgia; Vilinus in Lithuania; Freetown in
Sierra Leone; Stockholm in Sweden; Rio de Janeiro in Brazil;
Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula in Honduras; Barcelona, Madrid,
and Cadaque in Spain; Locarno in Switzerland; and Tokyo and Kyoto
in Japan. Since 1998 Poleskie has been devoting himself mainly
to writing fiction, and more recently (2004) to digital photography.
In 2000 he destroyed a vast number of his early works, and withdrew
all the rest from the market. Additional information on Poleskie
can be found in Who’s Who in America, (2006) and Who’s
Who in the World, (2006) and on his blog, Where is Stephen (Steve)
Poleskie Now?
http://journals.aol.com/spoleskie/WhereisStephenStevePoleskieNow/
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