Board Member Spotlight: Steven Alles
By Noah Kocher, ArtWell Intern
During my internship, I had the chance to meet ArtWell board member Steve Alles at his studio just north of Chinatown, along with ArtWell Communications Director Tiffany Zerby and Digital Media Specialist Stan Augustin. Steve greeted us on the blazing sidewalk outside the warehouse-turned-artist-collective, and he led us and our cameras up the building’s tight steps to his studio on the second floor. Steve sat down at a table in the center of the room, with his empty easel behind him.
The walls of the studio were covered in his work, with a small gallery space in the very front of the room. The building, which is also home to small art galleries as well as institutions like Vox Populi and Iffy Books, holds open houses, Steve explained as we set up our recording equipment. “I was blown away by the people coming through, I had no idea,” he said. “And that’s when I realized, I had to up my game.” So, he built his gallery space himself in the entryway of his studio.
One of Steve’s paintings, of the rounded corner of a teal office building in Steve’s distinctive, colorful style, drew my eye in particular. Steve had told me about the building—the now-abandoned Division of Disease Control, where he worked on the city’s public health efforts for decades—as we were scheduling our interview. His painting of it stuck in my mind as the focus of my curiosity about Steve’s work; it symbolized the intersection of his public health and art careers, and the intersection of both with his position on ArtWell’s board.
The recording equipment was ready, and Steve and I began our chat in earnest. I asked him first about his own history, including his career and his eventual connection with ArtWell. Steve attended medical school at Syracuse, he told us, and then moved to Philadelphia when he matched with Temple’s hospital system for his residency. He later completed both a residency in preventative medicine and a Masters of Epidemiology at the University of Maryland. He returned to Philadelphia to work with the Public Health department, focusing at first on foodborne and respiratory illnesses and, later, on STD prevention and education. He came to ArtWell just over two years ago when he met ArtWell board member Angela Steel, who worked at GlaxoSmithKline with Steve’s husband. Angela suggested, he said, that his public health background would be a positive addition to the board, and Steve agreed. “I've worked here for 25 years,” he said. “I worked at Temple University Hospital, so I saw firsthand what the social challenges are for a lot of families here in Philadelphia.” The idea of working on an arts education project for youth resonated with Steve’s own memories of being a young person, particularly coming out as gay. “Those are, you know, dark times. They can be for a lot of kids. They were for me,” he told us. “It just resonated with me that kids here probably have a ton of issues, maybe similar to what I experienced on some level, but also different problems and issues, and I just thought ArtWell is a great opportunity to get kids to open up a little bit more and think creatively.”
Childhood memories have also recently impacted Steve’s artwork. In the two years since his retirement from public health work, his work, which he mostly does in oil painting, has featured his parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, other relatives, and the style of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “It's really helped me to dig back into who I was as a boy and why I was creative then and what I'm going to do now,” Steve said.
Memories from his public health career have shaped Steve’s recent work as well. “The themes and the images of what I'm doing are really around a lot of things I did with my own sexuality, where I used to dress in drag for the City Health Department at pride events to promote sexually transmitted disease testing, prevention, vaccination,” he told us. A series of Steve’s recent paintings feature himself as an adult, dressed in drag, but placed in childhood memories. However, these paintings don’t only explore Steve’s personal memory, they’re also a vehicle for him to understand and communicate the urgency of recent attacks on public health and public health funding. Steve’s painting of the abandoned Division of Disease Control building serves this purpose for him as well. He pointed out to us that, in his painting, he’s added pro-public health messaging in graffiti onto the side of the building.
This painting, which had struck me as the intersection of Steve’s multiple careers, was all I’d hoped and more when Steve explained it. His lens of public health applied to memory, art, and education, is invaluable for ArtWell’s mission and its board. Check out a video of our interview below!