Born in Pennsylvania, Steve Keister obtained his BFA and MFA from the Tyler School of Art, graduating in 1973 and moving to New York City where he works and lives today. Every year he visits Mexico. “I first visited Mexico in 1979,” he says, “and have returned with increasing frequency since then, resulting in an enduring fascination with the manifestations of Pre-Colombian civilization. I have a predilection for geometric order embodied in tactile form.” He works primarily in sculpture, assembling found objects and making three-dimensional casts of their shapes, “resuming,” he says, the “formal sequences” of geometric arrangement that characterize Mesoamerican art. In the mid-nineties he became interested in ceramics and his subsequent work has developed a strong focus on that medium. Keister has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. He has held one-man shows at the Gagosian Gallery, the Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work has appeared in group shows at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He was part of the Whitney Biennial in 1981.
