Charles Steckler: Contrary to What Sometimes Happens

August 27 – December 11, 2016

Curated by Julie Lohnes, Curator of Art Collections & Exhibitions

Charles Steckler, Contrary to What Sometimes Happens, 2009-2010, mixed media

Charles Steckler is a draughtsman, stage designer, and collage and diorama artist. He combines many different means of manipulating materials, such as assemblage, painting, printmaking and photography to create his artwork.

Steckler has exhibited nationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has designed stage sets for nearly 200 productions. He has been a Yaddo fellow, an associate at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center, a Prix de Rome finalist and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Steckler received his B.A. from Queens College in New York and his M.F.A. from Yale University. He is currently the Dwane W. Crichton Professor of Theater and Designer-in-Residence at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.

I am a bricoleur; collage is my method. My materials are familiar and modest: household detritus, found discards, things too worthless to save, which I salvage and reincarnate. I look for correspondences among these materials on my worktable. Ideas emerge and connections are made during my process of arrangement, synthesis and discovery.

— Charles Steckler

This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance and the Humanities Faculty Development Board.