Stephen De Staebler

[
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 1969-1970]

Stephen De Staebler is an American sculptor and printmaker who was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1933. During his undergraduate summers, he studied art at Black Mountain College with Robert Motherwell and Ben Shahn. He graduated from Princeton University with a BA in religion in 1954. In 1961, he received an MA from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught for many years at the San Francisco Art Institute.

De Staebler worked primarily in fired clay during the 1960s and 1970s, but began to make bronze castings in the 1980s. When he turned his attention to monotypes, he approached them in a sculptural manner. He would attach layers of tape and shards of broken and scratched plexiglass to plexiglass plates, inking them and running them through the press multiple times. Many of these monotypes suggest body-parts. De Staebler lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

References

* Adams, Doug, "Transcendence with the Human Body in Art: George Segal, Stephen De Staebler, Jasper Johns, and Christo", New York, Crossroad, 1991.
* De Staebler, Stephen, "Stephen De Staebler, Sculpture", Oakland, CA, Oakland Museum, 1974.
* De Staebler, Stephen, "Stephen De Staebler, The Figure", San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1987.