Stephen De Staebler
MASKS AND MONUMENTAL FIGURES
November 21, 2021 - April 3, 2022
Crocker Art Museum
Masks and Monumental Figures, a two-part exhibition featuring a selection of Stephen De Staebler’s early masks and larger figurative sculptures, is on view at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento through April 3, 2022. Curated by Rachel Gotlieb, the show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue focusing on the artist’s masks and published by Dolby Chadwick Gallery.
Over the course of a career that spanned five decades, the internationally celebrated Bay Area sculptor Stephen De Staebler (1933–2011) created powerful, profoundly symbolic sculptures in clay and bronze that merged ancient and modern vocabularies while capturing the physical and spiritual struggles inherent to the human condition. His life experiences and education played a significant role in shaping his interest in the human form, which he presented as fragmented and deconstructed, whittled down and built back up. At a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the arena of art-making, De Staebler championed the figure, becoming a pivotal force in both the Bay Area Figurative and California Clay Movements.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1933, De Staebler majored in Religious Studies at Princeton University and spent time at the famed Black Mountain College before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s. There he studied with the renowned ceramicist Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a master’s degree in fine art. De Staebler’s honors and awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1979, 1981) and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1983). His art can be found in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum; de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, among others. He died at the age of 78, in 2011, from complications of cancer in Berkeley, California. A retrospective of his life’s work, Matter + Spirit, was held at the de Young, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, in 2012.