Keyes Art is pleased to present Rewritten Histories, a two-person exhibition of paintings by Peter McGough and Clintel Steed. The exhibition pairs two artists who treat art history as raw material, filtering inherited images and narratives through personal experience to author new ones. Peter McGough (b. 1958, Syracuse)  | | Peter McGough |
Rewrites history through duration and in-scription. From 1980–1995, with David McDermott, he lived as a Victorian gen-tleman in a candle-lit townhouse without electricity, making art only with obso-lete 19th-century techniques. That project of lived anachronism continues in his colored pencil works on paper. In Reflections on the Self, 2025, a Jungian dia-gram of Persona, Ego, and Shadow faces a profile whose brain is mapped with profanity, prayer, and panic — the inner world rendered as both diagram and di-ary. Roaming the Anthropological Museum in Napoli, 2023, places a musta-chioed dandy in a checkered suit before Greco-Roman sculpture, his head re-placed by a black-figure kylix depicting explicit homoerotic ritual. McGough in- serts queer desire directly into the museum’s classical record. Emporium of Dis-sidence, 2024, centers a flapper amid a field of multicolored chromosome-like forms, while A Crashing Bore, 2025, stages two Edwardian gentlemen before Hokusai’s Great Wave, the pun in the title undercutting the sublime. McGough uses historical style as camouflage, then detonates it with humor, sexuality, and self. Clintel Steed (b. 1977, Salt Lake City)
Collapses myth and modernity in paint. In Two figures with two birds, 41 x 34 in, acrylic on paper, a blue-faced woman and a dark-skinned man cradle doves against a backdrop of ochre, red, and arching forms that recall Roman frescoes and Byzantine icons. Steed’s figures are fractured and rebuilt in thick, gestural fields — identity shifts across a single face, color refuses to stay contained. His Untitled, 45 x 32.5 in, pushes this further: two interlocking bodies in hot pink, green, and electric purple confront the viewer against a fractured landscape of lime and red. Birds reappear as witnesses — a hummingbird, a sandpiper — while Steed’s urgent facture turns classical coupling into a contemporary question of survival, race, and tender-ness. For Steed, “painting your truth” means letting ancient motifs and present-day urgency occupy the same canvas. Outside the Cycle
Crucially, both McGough and Steed work outside of trends or current art fads. Steed’s thick impasto and art-historical collisions are not responsive to market aesthetics; they’re compelled by a private urgency to reconcile Rubens, Egyptian murals, and Black fatherhood on the same surface. McGough’s decision in the 1980s to abandon electricity and embrace cyanotype had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with survival — a way to make work that could out-last the decade’s hype. Today, his colored pencil drawings ignore the speed and finish of digital painting in favor of slow, obsessive handwork. Neither artist chases the contemporary. They build their own timelines, and invite history to catch up. Rewritten Histories Both artists start with borrowed forms — couples, allegories, museum artifacts, master prints — and make them answer to their own lives. Steed fractures the canon with impasto and color shifts, pulling Egyptian murals and Rubens into a present tense of Black experience and parenthood. McGough inhabits the ar-chive through slow rendering and period drag, then rewires it with mordant wit and queer inscription.
45 Main Street | Sag Harbor, NY 11963
#keysart#sunstormfineartmagazine.com
#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com#artfunnow#artfunhamptons
#artfunhistory#artfunnew,
| 
