Nicola Triscott
Steve Kurtz, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), was one of the most uncompromising practitioners of politically engaged art, whose work over nearly four decades challenged how artists might intervene in the intersections of science, technology, and state power. His death leaves an enormous gap in tactical media and critical art practice.
Formed in 1987 in Tallahassee, CAE developed what they termed “tactical media,” a practice distinguished by its insistence on direct engagement with the material systems it critiqued. Their early publications, including The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas, became foundational texts for networked resistance practices. But it was CAE’s subsequent move into biotechnology that proved genuinely radical. They weren’t making art about science; they were performing scientific procedures, challenging who controls biological materials and knowledge production itself.
CAE’s work in the UK centered on a collaboration with Arts Catalyst spanning fifteen years, beginning with GenTerra (2001–3) at Gallery Oldham and London’s Natural History Museum. This participatory performance invited audiences to grow transgenic bacteria before playing “genetic Russian roulette” with a bacteria release machine. The work demystified genetic engineering through direct engagement, exposing the constructed nature of biotechnological fear and interrogating the spectacle of risk assessment—while trusting audiences’ capacity for complexity and making abstract technological systems viscerally immediate.
In May 2004, Kurtz’s practice collided catastrophically with the post-9/11 security apparatus. After reporting his wife Hope’s death from heart failure, FBI agents detained Kurtz for twenty-two hours on suspicion of bioterrorism. When charges proved baseless, the government pursued mail fraud allegations over $256 worth of harmless bacteria. The case dragged on until it was finally dismissed as “insufficient on its face” in 2008. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 2007 film Strange Culture documented Kurtz’s Kafkaesque ordeal, crystalizing the chilling effects of security culture on artistic and scientific freedom.
Despite the FBI’s confiscation of his research materials, Kurtz reconstructed and completed Marching Plague (2006), an Arts Catalyst commission filmed on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. Recreating 1950s UK military experiments that tested plague as a naval weapon, the work used dark comedy to interrogate why governments continue to invest billions in failed bioweapons programs, exposing how manufactured fear becomes infrastructure for expanded state and corporate power.
While CAE’s primary commitment was tactical intervention rather than art-world legitimation, their work gained significant institutional recognition by being exhibited at the Whitney Museum, ICA London, and Documenta 13. In Kassel, CAE’s A Public Misery Message deployed a helicopter rising 738 feet to represent the top 1 percent’s wealth in a spectacle of inequality that disrupted Documenta’s contemplative atmosphere with impossible-to-ignore noise.
CAE’s final UK project, Graveyard of Lost Species (2015–16, with YoHa), created a temporary monument on a Thames Estuary fishing boat, gathering memories of extinct species and vanished livelihoods. The work demonstrated how environmental destruction operates through gradual erasure, rendering collective amnesia a condition of capital’s “acceptable losses.”
CAE’s practice endures as a rigorous model for art that refuses complicity, insisting that cultural production engage the urgent political formations of its moment—a standard few other contemporary practitioners meet.
This piece first appeared in the February 2026 issue of Art Monthly.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
To this day, I still vividly remember sitting in a carpool, driving from the University of California, Davis, where I was teaching, to San Francisco, when a fellow passenger casually mentioned that an artist had been arrested for bioterrorism. “What? Why?” I asked, eager to find out more. “This is outrageous,” I commented. A few heads nodded in agreement, but the conversation moved on. The surface story was apparent, but the details of the situation were submerged and difficult to find.
As soon as I got home, I researched the case and became utterly infuriated, leading to my locating and questioning his attorney, who also could not, or rather would not, offer any information about the case or the process. Because it was such an outrageous threat to freedom of speech, not only for artists but for the entire population, I felt an obligation to inform as many people as I could about Steve’s incarceration and the likelihood that he was targeted for his work questioning government policies.
To reach the most people, I decided to do a film, which I hoped would outrage others into action. Within four days we were shooting what became Strange Culture. As Steve couldn’t legally talk about the case, actors Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Peter Coyote, and Josh Kornbluth interpreted the story through a combination of dramatic reenactment, news footage, animation, and testimonials.
At the end of the film, Steve and his longtime collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, former chair of the genetics department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date. As of late May 2008, the Buffalo prosecutor declined to reopen the case. Steve Kurtz was a free man.
Samuel Ashford
When I was three years old, I knew the man as “Steve 1” because seconds after meeting him, I met the magnanimous Steve 2 (Steve Barnes, cofounder of Critical Art Ensemble). This taught me to number the Steves in my life. In fact, I recently found myself talking to one of my present favorites, Steve 37, about my first Steve and how great he was.
My first memories of Steve are of one of his eyes squinted with the other in the viewfinder of a Betamax camera (as if aiming a bazooka), and of him egging me on to do crazy shit. I remember screaming as I threw two-by-four stubs off our roof at him, which he dodged as he cackled with that infectious laugh. He’d encourage me to hunt squirrels with sticks and hide the sticks in a hollowed tree, all caught on his Betacam.
Even as a child, I could describe to Steve who I was and how I felt, and he’d make a serious face. And he would laugh, revealing this beautiful smile and eyes that would bug out as if about to pop. He had an infectious laugh; everyone laughed when he did. Me too. And those huge teeth! I remember thinking back then, “Don’t mess with Steve, because if you do, he might bite you. And if he did, that would hurt so bad.”
I remember the 1996 blizzard in Brooklyn and the tunnels we would dig as kids. We took the trees from the Christmas throwaway piles and made a forest on the avenue. Steve liked the story about when my dad and I went to visit Steve 1 and Steve 2, and they were hacking stuff on a computer. Steve 1 handed me a disk of pirated computer games and said, “I love Wolfenstein cuz it’s like Doom, except you kill Nazis. You also have to try Spaceship Warlock. Go to the bar and order the ‘Martian fizz’ and click on the stage—an alien in a bikini will come up and dance!” He was animated, and he chuckled and bared his teeth. Steve 2 nodded in agreement, knowingly. My friend Timmy and I went crazy over these games for more than a year.
When I was a teenager, Steve would come stay at my dad’s house and they would drink a bottle of Jim Beam every night. A joyous and cajoling person with this gigantic joie de vivre, he was at the same time a sensitive man, sometimes even sad. He’d decompress his swollen mind at night. He would take my bed in the basement but come upstairs to watch me play samurai video games where I would kill thousands of digital men. “What if all those guys were capitalists?” he would ask and then take a slug of the Jim Beam. When he left to go back up to Buffalo and I would get my bed back, a last sip of the Jim Beam would be waiting for me. I’d drink it and feel the perverse revolutionary spirit turning in my gut.
When I was young, my dad and Steve would talk and argue for hours, but I couldn’t understand much. I became an artist myself just to understand what the big deal was. I then decided they were wrong and I became a cicada. Maybe they were right in the past—at the bars and parties and shows. Regardless, Steve taught me a lot, and he was a great artist. Painful as it was for him to witness the world, he stayed a teacher and taught a lot of people. He could see the truth and then exceed it in discrete or invisible ways, as if holding something too small that was also too big—like the Petri dish that would bring the whole FBI down on him immediately following a tremendous personal loss. “A fight to the death,” he called it.
Later on, at Documenta 13 in 2012, I helped my father make a shack for his funny paintings. Critical Art Ensemble displayed on an extended scissor lift a massive vertical bar chart of global economic inequity divided amongst the population. I was happily around six inches from the ground with the global majority. 97 percent went up to about six feet while a perverse 2 percent took the rest, up to the top of the chart. Next to this chart was a helicopter that flew me to up a height where I thought I saw the Alps, or at least a Hessian hill as a gumball, and Hercules standing there too, as just a speck of color. Joy, iconoclasm, perversity! The lessons of Steve.
Maybe the man drank a bottle of whiskey every night, but he also looked at things that few dare to. The FBI chased him, and he laughed. He bared his teeth, and he bit them. I eat Steve for breakfast and I digest the experiences we had—artist to artist. We all should. If everyone were a tiny bit more like Steve, the world would be better. So please raise your hand as we do at school. Reach upward. Ask questions. Clench your hand into a fist in honor of the man we knew. And repeat after me: “No one makes art alone.”
Presented on April 25, 2026, together with Sam’s father Doug, for the Steve Kurtz Memorial at Middle Church in the East Village.
Doug Ashford
No one makes art alone.
Almost forty years ago, I was invited by Steve Kurtz, as a member of the then-just-forming Critical Art Ensemble, to visit Tallahassee, Florida and speak about Group Material. I prepared a short talk for a formal academic setting but soon discovered that it wouldn’t be delivered at any kind of lecture hall, but at the local bar that night. My work at the time was oriented around expanding the idea of both audience and artwork to include the everyday and rejecting the formalisms and elitisms of the industrial art system, so giving a talk about Walter Benjamin in a rented warehouse full of people drinking beer was a dream come true.
In Tallahassee, Steve and I were familiar to each other immediately. Through waves of laughter against the wails of despondency that surrounded us both at that time, we began building our connection over the people and art we loved. Over the next few years, we shared a commitment to make as much work as we could. As artists trying to continue in a world marked by indifference and violence, our love for each other made collaboration necessary and friendship political. What a remarkable thing! Over the following years, Steve and I were in constant contact. We made movies of my son Sam and my daughter Molly. We planned conferences and parties. We shared and networked with other artists and activists. We ate lobster dinners and took long walks in Prospect Park.
Our friendship grew deeper after 1991, when Steve asked Vermont College to hire me to teach with him at one of the first low-residency MFA programs in visual art in the country. I think Steve and I were together there for at least eight years, returning every six months to the same Motel 6 just outside of town. We served martinis at lectures about Lacan, drove out to swimming holes at midnight, built snow caves that housed student exhibitions, called for masquerading athletics between formalist and conceptualist students, and then invited everyone to join a “puppy pile” (those that know, know).
As teachers, we knew that it would be ineffectual for us to present ourselves as professionalization surrogates for all art industrial centers (I mean give me a break). We could not be mortgaged to the museum, the market, or art magazines. Instead, we tried to organize study in which critical thinking could be applied to the specific situation each student presented as their own concern. Vermont’s emphasis on process over product, on context over form, allowed us to practice on the edge of the nonrational, insisting that through study, each student would become their own best experiment. This wasn’t just an abstraction or a concept. It was an invented and situational autonomy.
Somewhere between the practical and the magical is where Steve changed my life. As all of us who worked with him know, he had an incorrigible and reliable insistence that everything we do as artists and teachers somehow reflects both the social injustices around us and the unknown potential of alternative consciousnesses.
Although I am a practicing artist to this day, our frightening, delicate, stunning reflection on teaching is one reason why today, I still always prefer to sit with a student rather than a curator or a gallerist. It’s Steve’s fault. As both desirous and dutiful, Steve remained close to us all because his work lived through the very real feelings he had for anyone who gave him reason to relate. Art, in a way, as he said many times, was just our alibi, a convenient performance into which we insert the most beautiful disturbance we can, insofar as we keep a “yet to come” visible—practically and magically.
Presented on April 25, 2026, together with Doug’s son Sam, for the Steve Kurtz Memorial at Middle Church in the East Village.
Julie Ault
Steve Kurtz was often the brightest mind in the room. Those unfamiliar with his brilliance were routinely stunned the first time they heard him speak, yet his intellect was never intimidating. Steve was a warm, exuberant presence with a subtle and generous mind. While others can better detail his professional legacy with Critical Art Ensemble, I want to speak to the man I knew as a comrade and close friend, particularly how he lived with illness and imminent death.
We met in 1987, when Steve invited Group Material to Tallahassee to present our work. In the decades that followed, our in-person visits were intermittent, but our bond was absolute. When Steve was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021, we maintained close contact until he transitioned into the metaphysical.
Beyond his mastery of discourse and political analysis, Steve was a genius at simply being—spirited, exceptionally kind, and fully present. He had a rare talent for hanging out—conversing, playing, and laughing. He thrived on personal stimulation and loved long, libation-fueled nights with loved ones and friends where the only objective was to delight and entertain one another. He was a night owl who treated drinking as a science—pacing himself to squeeze every drop of conversation, thought, and pleasure out of every waking minute.
Reflecting on his life’s work following his diagnosis, Steve was remarkably at peace. “Mission accomplished,” he told me. “I’m not in combat mode.” Having retired from teaching to Tallahassee—where CAE first took root in 1987—he felt a newfound sense of liberty. “It’s freeing to have no institutional pressure that can affect the direction of work,” he said. He was fulfilled, ensconced with Lucia Sommer, his partner and wife of twenty years, in a lovely neighborhood, surrounded by his closest circles.
Steve did not diminish with illness. He purified and intensified. For four and a half years, he rode the medical rollercoaster with resolve: weathering pain and countless symptoms, his spirits rising and sinking with every test result and new prognosis. Continually metabolizing, his outlook was one of radical realism. “I am going where the cancer says. It’s over when it’s over. Or if quality of life drops too low. Right-to-die state, here I come.”
Though repeatedly told he had only months to live, he rallied at death’s door time and again. As this long oscillation period persisted, he moved between the recurrent reprieve of life and the necessity of letting go, as his own words convey:
“Another near-death experience. I was definitely not ready to go.”
“Crushed it, looks like you’re not rid of me yet.”
“The swing is no fun. I want more life. I can still be productive. So many people I want to see.”
“If the Reaper came for me tonight, I’d go with no hard feelings.”
Not many people look good in yellow. Yet the yellow T-shirt that he often wore with the grim reaper on a bike—his soul-harvesting scythe on his shoulder and a little black dog chasing him—looked all-out festive on Steve. Along with ghost and skeleton emojis, the angel of death garb was both amulet and dare. Despite yellow’s association with cowardice, Steve was its antithesis. He met every trial—personal or public—with raw guts, sharp instinct, and an intrepid intellect. He was committed to fearless truth-telling.
In the spring of 2024, Steve’s spirit of inquiry and the urgency to examine the country’s dangerous totalitarian turn took him back to research and writing for a new CAE book. Diving into rejuvenating cerebral waters, he explored inner experience in relation to the rise of Christian nationalism and its dogmatic control of inner life, personal behavior, and public policy. The mission was electrifying; he threw himself into it completely. While struggling physically, his mind was soaring. As Steve reflected:
Near death marks a point where you can learn what in your original life plan has been exhausted and start a new plan in the same life by this consciousness remake. I feel like I have changed so much over the past few years since near death. What is important to me and what I think about are completely different. My current projects would never have crossed my mind four years ago. We wouldn’t be having this same conversation.
During Steve’s final public talk inaugurating Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism, he reflected on a career spent seeking material answers to material problems, an outlook that he was now somewhat skeptical of. Yet Steve had never regarded life as simply physical reality. He was open-minded and actively explored various tools for divination. As his conditions progressed, he became more attuned to metaphysical experience and the psychic realm of enchantments—“the kinds of experience that cannot be explained through causal or quantitative discourse and can instead only be addressed through speculative discourse.”
Near-death experiences, fever dreams, and powerful pain meds sometimes transported him into parallel realities with blurred boundaries. “I live in multiple worlds now.” With his feet on the ground and his mind free, Steve harmonized scientific rigor with imaginative insight, beautifully exemplified in CAE’s Unreality and Its Discontents.
Steve Kurtz’s and CAE’s tangible contributions are ample. Steve also leaves behind an immense, intangible aftermath in the many communities of people he touched, inspired, and transformed. It’s up to us to carry forward and build on these enduring gifts.
Trevor Paglen
Steve Kurtz was probably the most influential artist of his generation, yet some of his most devoted audiences had no idea he was an artist.
Years ago, while I was working with Laura Poitras on the Snowden materials in Berlin, I found myself among a veritable A-Team of legendary hackers: folks from Anonymous, LulzSec, WikiLeaks, Tor, and the Chaos Computer Club. I realized that I shared with them a crucial canonical foundation: Critical Art Ensemble’s The Electronic Disturbance and their Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas.1 These l337 h4x0rz (“elite hackers”)—some of whom had spent time in prison, had active warrants out for their arrest, or were under intense surveillance—had absorbed Steve and CAE’s books with the same seriousness they brought to mail protocols and zero-day exploits.
CAE had given their emerging culture of digital resistance both a theory and a name years before “hacktivism” became a term. The lineage from CAE’s writing to virtual sit-ins for Zapatista rebels to the whistleblowing infrastructure that produced WikiLeaks runs through Steve’s work. But these hackers were pretty confused when I talked about Steve and CAE’s artwork. It didn’t seem to register that the collective behind the books was called Critical Art Ensemble, which wasn’t any more surprising back then than it would be today.
Steve and CAE weren’t making work for people who went to galleries and galas, and that was on purpose. Much of what Steve was doing occupied the terrain of what Nicolas Bourriaud called “relational aesthetics,” except CAE did it earlier and without any interest in being anointed by the world of blue-chip art. Giving away free money, beer, and cigarettes, creating situations, refusing to aestheticize the gesture. When the Whitney Biennial came calling, Steve reportedly told the curators to shove it. This position became harder to maintain after the FBI saga though.
Steve’s most devoted audience was undoubtedly his students, who consistently became his long-term friends—the people he adopted and who adopted him, and who also didn’t relate to him as an artist in any institutional sense. They knew him as having no hierarchy of valid practice: abstract painting, ceramics, whatever you were making, he was in. They knew him as someone whose seminars migrated to the bar in the evenings and didn’t end until 3 a.m., which even then probably broke the faculty code of conduct, in spite of being absolutely necessary. Steve maintained genuine lifelong friendships with students going back decades—which is rarer than it sounds and says more about him than anything else.
Steve Kurtz died on November 12, 2025, with his partner Lucia Sommer beside him. He was sixty-seven. His last book was finished on his watch. Typically, he made sure the work got out.
Their canon also included Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, which I have yet to watch.
