Steve Poleskie

Steve Poleskie (born Stephen Francis Poleskie; June 3, 1938 – December 21, 2019) was an American artist, printmaker, aerobatic pilot, performance artist, and writer. He founded Chiron Press, described as one of the first fine-art screen-printing studios in New York City, and produced prints for artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. A self-taught artist, he had his first solo exhibition at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1958, while still in college.

New York City and Chiron Press In 1962 Poleskie took a studio on East 10th Street in New York City, a center of postwar avant-garde activity associated with the New York School and the downtown artist-run cooperative scene. In 1963 he opened a screen-printing studio that became Chiron Press, described as one of the first fine-art screen-printing shops in New York City. Chiron Press has been cited in studies of American Pop art and postwar printmaking as an important site where painters associated with Pop, post-Abstract Expressionism, and Color Field painting experimented with commercial screen-printing processes in a fine-art context.

One of the printers at Chiron Press was Brice Marden, then an emerging artist. During this period Poleskie was active in the downtown New York art community and associated with artists and critics including Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, and Louise Nevelson. His own screen prints from the 1960s, often minimal or landscape-based compositions, were acquired by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Aerial Theater and performance art In 1968 Poleskie sold Chiron Press and accepted a teaching position at Cornell University.

Crispolti compared this work to a continuation of Italian Futurism, particularly its embrace of speed, technology, and skywriting as a visual language. Poleskie performed Aerial Theater in the United States and Europe from the late 1960s through the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes collaborating with dancers, musicians, and parachutists.

In 1998 Poleskie retired from aerobatic performance and sold his aircraft. Works on paper from his Aerial Theater period entered public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate in London; a Kunstverein in Kassel, Germany; the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy; and Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland.

Writing After retiring from aerobatic performance, Poleskie devoted increasing time to fiction and nonfiction writing. His publications include The Balloonist: The Story of T. S. C. Lowe—Inventor, Scientist, Magician, and Father of the U.S. Air Force (2007), a biographical novel based on the life of Civil War aeronaut and military balloonist Thaddeus S. C. Lowe. He later published additional novels, including The Third Candidate (2008) and Grater Life (2009).

Later work In 2000 Poleskie destroyed a significant portion of his early artworks and withdrew most of his remaining early work from circulation. He began working in digital photography in 2004 and exhibited this work in Ithaca in 2006.

Personal life Poleskie was married to author Jeanne Mackin; the couple lived in Ithaca, New York. His post-Chiron archives were deposited in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library. His work has been acquired posthumously by Wilkes University, the National Gallery of Denmark, and the Kosciuszko Foundation, among other public institutions worldwide.

In 2023, an untitled work by Poleskie was included in the exhibition Land Use at a Marywood University art gallery, alongside works by Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

In 2024, and continuing into 2025, several of Poleskie's Chiron-era silkscreens and collaborations were shown at New York's Terrain Gallery in the exhibition Surface to Begin With—Silkscreens of the 1960s. A review in Whitehot Magazine stated that there was "an exhilaration to the choice of works as each seems to beckon one's attention over another".

A solo exhibition, Tracing the Sky: Steve Poleskie's Aerial Theater on Paper, opened at the Maslow Study Gallery for Contemporary Art at Marywood University in October 2025. The exhibition, curated by Ryan Ward (curator of the Maslow Collection) and Evan D. Williams, presented prints, collages, and drawings related to the artist's sky performances and was accompanied by an illustrated catalog produced in collaboration with Marywood's Aviation and Graphic Design students.

In 2025, the publisher OM Books announced a planned monograph on Poleskie's Aerial Theater work above and around New York City.