17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
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ROCK’N’ROLL WALL OF FAME
Artist Steve Lacy fuses rock’n’rollers with Nantucket in a new collection of prints.
story by Larry Lindner
Rock stars are rarely spotted walking the streets of Nantucket. No one has ever come across Mick Jagger playing fetch with his dog on Surfside or stood behind Axl Rose in line at the Juice Bar. But thanks to frequent island summer visitor Steve Lacy, these kinds of rock ’n’ roll sightings are not impossible to imagine.
When he’s not anchoring the news for New York City’s FOX affiliate, WNYW-TV, Lacy can be found working on art that combines photography and silk-screening to create Andy Warhol-esque images of rock stars superimposed on Nantucket backdrops. Lacy brings his art to life through a painstaking process of photoshopping the images to manipulate light and texture and then draining color and applying it anew from a silk screen onto a canvas. It takes weeks—up to 100 hours—to finish one piece in a physically arduous process of squeezing colors where they need to be. Lacy can dream up his creations—Slash from Guns N’ Roses holding a striped bass instead of a guitar, for instance—or you can commission him to pair the rocker of your choice with an island landmark.
Michelle Kroin has a huge silk screen of Jerry Garcia in Nantucket red pants and a Juice Bar T-shirt in her Dionis kitchen. “We’re Deadheads,” she says of herself and her husband. “Normally, rock ’n’ roll doesn’t scream ‘beach’ or ‘Nantucket,’ but everyone loves it. Of all the art we have in our house, Steve’s piece is our hands-down favorite.”
In their Quidnet game room, Jodi and Mark Loughlin have Stevie Nicks in front of the compass rose at Gardiner’s Corner. “We actually have a few of his pieces,” Jodi says. A number of them hang in showrooms across the country, as Mark owns a large commercial office furniture dealership. “Some of the country’s leading commercial interior designers come through,” Mark says, “and they love his stuff. People see it and then commission works of their own.”
In the Loughlins’ New York showroom, Lacy installed a Bruce Springsteen image with a map of the Eastern Seaboard in the background. “Nantucket is uber-emphasized” in that piece, Mark says. “It’s seriously one of the coolest pieces we own.” He adds, “Steve really takes the time to get to know the people” he’s creating for. “He asks all the right questions” and then comes up with something that truly reflects who the client is and how they relate to the rock artist.
Lacy gets his rocker images from Mark Weiss, one of the country’s premier rock photographers who has shot covers for everyone from Bon Jovi and Ozzy Osbourne to Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera. At first, Weiss was pretty involved in how Lacy used his photography. “Now,” he comments, “if Steve would say to me, ‘Mark, I want ten photos—we’re going to have a gallery exhibition,’ I would totally trust him to surprise me at the opening. He brings my work to a higher level.” The works have been exhibited in gallery spaces in New York, Miami and Greenwich, Connecticut.
Lacy says his aim is to create an image that “tells a story about the things a person loves most.” For many people, like Lacy himself, those things are Nantucket and rock ’n’ roll. It’s not surprising, he says. Both islanders and rock stars are one-of-a-kind. “Where else does anyone wear red pants with lobsters?” Jodi Loughlin hasn’t thought about it quite that way. She just likes that combining music and art with Nantucket “fills you up with all the good feels.” In addition to rock ’n’ roll-themed pieces, Steve also specializes in family portraits and hyperrealistic sports card art.
To see more of Steve Lacy’s Nantucket-inspired work or to commission a piece, visit www.nantucket2023.com
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