Episode 35: Daniel Efram on Steve Keene

It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years. Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews’ Arizona Record as well as Pavement’s Wowee Zowee on Matador. He had gone to college with David Berman (Silver Jews) and Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) in the 1980s, and they remained friends and collaborators afterward. Although he is known to many for his indie rock album covers, he has a much bigger audience today outside of the music scene of downtown NY from another era. Not only is he now collected in museums but he is still lovingly known for making affordable art: most of Keene’s work retails for under $70; in the 1990s heyday, it was only $5 or $10 a piece. Steve continues to crank out 50 paintings at a time, day-in and day-out, from his converted auto body shop home/studio in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked with his architect wife and family for decades. The Steve Keene Art Book—originally conceived during his sold out show at Shepard Fairey’s LA Gallery Subliminal Projects in 2016—is the first art book dedicated exclusively to his work as a fine artist. For this episode, I spoke with the book’s editor Daniel Efram, a photographer, producer, and long-time manager of the Apples in Stereo—for whom Keene also created the cover art on Fun Trick Noise Maker 25 years ago—about Steve Keene and his lifelong artistic journey. I’ve been a long-time fan and collector of Keene’s work. Twenty years ago, I spent a day with him, profiling him in the pages of Stop Smiling, “The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes,” which I published from 1995 to 2009 from Chicago and New York. Hence, this was a nice circle of life moment. The Steve Keene Art Book is published through Hat & Beard Press and Tractor Beam, Efram's New York City-based press.