Stephen 'Steve' Poleskie (born 1938 in Pringle, Pennsylvania

Pringle, Pennsylvania

Pringle is a borough in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. As of the 2000 census, the borough population was 991.-Geography:Pringle is located at ....

) is an artist and writer. The son of a high school teacher, Poleskie graduated from Wilkes University

Wilkes University

Wilkes University is a private, non-denominational American university located in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It has over 2,200 undergraduates and over 2,200 graduate students...

 in 1959 with a degree in Economics. A self-taught artist, Poleskie had his first one-person show at the Everhart Museum

Everhart Museum

The Everhart Museum is a non-profit art and natural history museum located in Nay Aug Park in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1908 by Dr. Isaiah Fawkes Everhart, a local medical doctor and skilled taxidermist. Many of the specimens in the museum's extensive ornithological collection came...

, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Scranton, Pennsylvania

Scranton is a city in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, United States. It is the county seat of Lackawanna County and the largest principal city in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area. Scranton had a population of 76,089 in 2010, according to the U.S...

 in 1958, while still in college. These works were largely abstract expressionistic in nature.

Life before art

After graduation Poleskie was employed briefly in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Wilkes-Barre is a city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the county seat of Luzerne County. It is at the center of the Wyoming Valley area and is one of the principal cities in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, which had a population of 563,631 as of the 2010 Census...

, as an insurance agent and commercial artist, before moving to Miami where he worked as a designer in a screen-printing

Screen-printing

Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate...

 shop. He remained in Florida only three months before leaving for the Bahamas and Cuba. His next job was as an art teacher at Gettysburg

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Gettysburg is a borough that is the county seat, part of the Gettysburg Battlefield, and the eponym for the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. The town hosts visitors to the Gettysburg National Military Park and has 3 institutions of higher learning: Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg College, and...

 High School where David Eisenhower

David Eisenhower

Dwight David Eisenhower II is an American author, public policy fellow, and eponym of the U.S. Presidential retreat, Camp David. He is the grandson of the 34th President of the United States, Dwight D...

 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, Poleskie drove to Mexico and California, returning to Pennsylvania, via Canada.

A move to New York

In 1962 Poleskie took a studio on 10th Street in New York City. At that time the New York School of art, also called the Tenth Street School, because most of the galleries were located on or near this street on Manhattan's lower East Side, was considered the dominant art movement in the world. Rather than join the ranks of the Abstract Expressionists, Poleskie enrolled in art classes at The New School

The New School

The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...

 with the figurative painter Raphael Soyer

Raphael Soyer

Raphael Soyer was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter...

.

Poleskie and Soyer soon became friends, and Soyer painted several paintings of his student. At the time, Poleskie had abandoned his abstract painting and was doing figurative work. When Poleskie had his first one-person show in New York at Morris Gallery, Soyer bought a painting. Morris later sold a large Poleskie to the playwright Lanford Wilson

Lanford Wilson

Lanford Wilson was an American playwright who helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters...

.

Involved in the New York art scene, Poleskie became friends with many of the artists and critics of the day including, Elaine and Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....

, Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...

, 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

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...

, Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...

, Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

, James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...

, Alex Katz

Alex Katz

Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...

, Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....

, and Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...

. One of the printers at Chiron Press was the young artist Brice Marden

Brice Marden

Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...

.

Poleskie's own screen prints

Release print

A release print is a copy of a film that is sent to a movie theater for exhibition.-Definitions:Release prints are not to be confused with the other types of print used in the photochemical post-production process:...

 from this time, rather minimal landscapes, the figures of the earlier works had walked out of the picture, were purchased by numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, and the Whitney Museum, in New York, and the National Collection in Washington, D. C.

After Chiron Press

In 1968, wanting more time to devote to his own art, Poleskie sold Chiron Press and accepted a teaching position at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in Ithaca, NY. It was here that he learned to fly, and developed his Aerial Theater, a unique art-in-the-sky form, for which he is best known. In his Aerial Theater performances Poleskie flew an aerobatic biplane, trailing smoke, through a series of maneuvers to create a four-dimensional design in the sky. Musicians, dancers, and 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

Futurism (art)

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...

, and the French art critic Pierre Restany

Pierre Restany

Pierre Restany , was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher.Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On returning to France in 1949 he attended the Lycée Henri-IV before studying at universities in France,...

, writing in the Italian art magazine D’ars dubbed it “Planetary Art” on the scale with Christo

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple who created environmental works of art...

’s installations. Poleskie’s biplane and drawings for various performances were exhibited at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York in 1978 and 1979.

Twenty-seven years after he began to fly, in 1998, having reached the age of sixty, and feeling his body could no longer take the excessive G force

G force

The g-force associated with an object is its acceleration relative to free-fall.It may also refer to:* G-Force , a 2009 film by Disney** G-Force , a 2009 video game based on the film...

s 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

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

, and the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

 in London; the Kunstverin in Kassel, Germany, the Castlevecchio in Verona, Italy, and the State Museum, in Lodz, Poland.

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; Vilnius 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.

Writing

Since 1998 Poleskie has been devoting himself mainly to writing fiction, including a biographical novel on the Civil War Balloonist Thaddeus S. C. Lowe

Thaddeus S. C. Lowe

Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe , also known as Professor T. S. C. Lowe, was an American Civil War aeronaut, scientist and inventor, mostly self-educated in the fields of chemistry, meteorology, and aeronautics, and the father of military aerial reconnaissance in the United States...

. In 2000 he destroyed a vast number of his early art works, and withdrew all the rest from the market. In 2004 Poleskie took up digital photography, and had his first show of these images in Ithaca in January 2006.

Stephen Poleskie is married to the author Jeanne Mackin, who also writes the Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women was set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, and published in 1868...

 mystery series under the name Anna Maclean. The couple live in Ithaca, New York

Ithaca, New York

The city of Ithaca, is a city in upstate New York and the county seat of Tompkins County, as well as the largest community in the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area...

.

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 web site, www.stephenpoleskie.com

External links

• Where is Stephen (Steve) Poleskie Now? (Blog)
• http://www.StephenPoleskie.com Stephen Poleskie Web Site