Anita Steckel


Anita Slavin Arkin Steckel was an American feminist artist known for paintings and photomontages with sexual imagery. She was also the founder of the arts organization "The Fight Censorship Group", whose other members included Hannah Wilke, Louise Bourgeois, Judith Bernstein, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Anne Sharpe and Joan Semmel.

Early life and education

Steckel was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants Dora and Hyman Arkin. She had an abusive mother and a father who struggled with a gambling problem and left home after an early graduation from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. As a single young woman, Steckel dated Marlon Brando and worked on a Norwegian freighter that traveled to South America for two months. She also worked as a dancing instructor, where she won a competition and was crowned the "Mambo Queen of Southern California". She then went back to New York to study at Cooper Union, and Alfred University, as well as completing advanced study at the Art Students League of New York with Edwin Dickinson She also taught for several years at The Art Students League of New York. In 1970, Steckel moved to the Westbeth Artists' Housing in Manhattan, New York, where she lived the rest of her life.

Artwork

Steckel began showing her work in both solo and group exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s. Her first publicly recognized work, a photomontage series titled "Mom Art" in 1963, included critiques of racism, war, and sexual inequalities. In her "Giant Woman" series of works, Steckel painted oversized nude women onto photographs of city scenes, an idea associated with a Women's movement theme that women had "outgrown their roles" in society as previously defined. In 1972, her work was exhibited at the Women's Interart Center in New York alongside pieces by the influential feminist artists Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringgold.
Steckel came to public attention after her solo exhibition, The Sexual Politics of Feminist Art, held at Rockland Community College in 1972. The exhibition was controversial because Steckel's work was sexually explicit and some local authorities called for the closure of the show.
She created a series of artworks concerning erections, in defense of which she said, “If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.”
In 2001, Steckel's work was exhibited at the Mitchell Algus Gallery.