Steve Rowell
Bio
Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts to produce complex multicomponent projects. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.
He holds an MFA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas. Awards and honors that Steve has earned include:
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the MacDowell Fellowship (2021-22)
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the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (Film, 2019)
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grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Film, 2016) and Creative Capital (Emerging Fields, 2013)
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artist residencies at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, at the Villa Aurora Berlin, and Fogo Island Arts
- visiting fellowships at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Newcastle University
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and the Erna Plachte scholarship at the University of Oxford
He has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago, 2003-2009), The Office of Experiments (London, 2009-present), and The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles, 2001-2013). Born in Houston, Steve has been based in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago over the past twenty years. Currently, he lives in Minneapolis, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the indigenous Dakota and Ojibwe peoples, where he teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is the founder of Gegenschein Media, the production company behind his moving image work.
Steve has taught at numerous institutions including:
- School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
- ArtCenter College of Design
- Scripps College
- University of Applied Arts Vienna
- Kansas City Art Institute
- University of Minnesota
He has been lecturer, guest artist, and portfolio committee member at numerous institutions including:
- Northwestern University
- Corcoran College of Art and Design
- Newcastle University
- University College London
- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)
- California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
- Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc)
Steve's work (collaborative and solo) has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums, including:
- New York: The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Apex Art, MoMA PS1, and Storm King
- Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Marfa: Ballroom Marfa
- Pittsburgh: The Center for PostNatural History
- Milwaukee: The Institute for Visual Art
- Chicago: The Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Contemporary Photography
- San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for The Arts
- Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,
- China Art Objects Gallery, and California Museum of Photography UC Riverside
- Istanbul: 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial
- London: The Barbican Art Centre, the Frieze Art Fair, and The Architecture Foundation
- Southampton: The John Hansard Gallery
- Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary Museum
- Cornwall: Groundwork 2018
- Halle an der Saale: Werkleitz 2010 festival
- Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, and Deutsche Bank Kunsthall