Artist Statement
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Steinson came to New York City in 1957 to work as an assistant to the student advisor at International House, having received a B.A. Degree in political science at the University of Louisville. Dedicated to human rights issues as a southerner but equally seduced by the arts, she studied sculpture under Peter Agostini at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She later received a B.A. Degree in Art Education from Columbia University Teachers College. In 1958, Steinson met Dr. Raphael Lemkin, author of the Genocide Convention of the United Nations and became an assistant to him in the preparation of his autobiography. She is presently a consultant to a documentary film on his life and work.
Steinson has exhibited her work in New York, California, Kentucky, Georgia, Switzerland and Austria. Although her earliest work was representational, she became an abstractionist under the impact of Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Small ovular and curvilinear forms in her early work gave way to more liberating, purely geometric structures that were free to move out of a central core to express movement, direction, space. She works almost exclusively, except in her works on paper, with curved planar forms and linear straight edges which suggest a more organic approach to form as opposed to the industrial purity of early minimalism. She works with welded steel and bronze and is drawn to both their particular energies.
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