Sunday, September 22 4-8 PM

“Imag(in)ing the Real”  The Art of Jack Keijo Steele

What is “real” – real life, real feelings, real experience?  Working in the middle of the twentieth century, and often associated with a style known as 20th century or urban “realism”, Jack Keijo Steele created images that reflect daily life, troubled times, and deep feeling, allowing us to see beneath and beyond the images to explore profound questions of human life, culture, joy, and pain.  As one observer from the Cranbrook Art Museum has described it, referring to a war image, “Steele depicts this subject with a painterly vigor that verges on abstraction, relating the emotional impact of war as only the artist can convey it.

This show of Steele family-owned pieces includes finished works as well as studio sketches, notes, and works-in-progress.

Jack Keijo Steele was born in 1919 in Ironwood, Michigan, and died in 2003 in Garden City, Michigan.