Stephen Westfall is an artist, writer and educator born in Schenectady, New York who received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first solo exhibition in 1984 at Tracey Garet in New York’s East Village earned reviews in Art in America and Artnews. Exhibitions followed during the 1980s and into the 1990s at Daniel Newburg Gallery in New York, Galerie Paal in Munich, Germany and Galerie Wilma Lock in St. Gallen, Switzerland. An exhibition of paintings took place at Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1995, followed by several exhibitions at Galerie Zurcher in Paris. Westfall has been represented in New York by Lennon, Weinberg since 1997. Recent work has been exhibited at KunstgalerieBonn in Germany and David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe.

Stephen has been included in several important survey exhibitions of abstract painting including a show at the Musée d’art moderne in Saint-Etienne, France in 1997 and in both exhibitions titled Conceptual Abstraction, first at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991 and in the exhibition that revisited that show which took place at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012.

His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, the Munson Williams Proctor Museum in Utica, New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome during 2009 and 2010. He is a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and in the graduate program at Bard University. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America.

This is the first of two conversations Brian had with Stephen. This one was in his Industry City studio in Brooklyn. Stephen tells his story growing up, making art, writing, and much more.