POINT PLEASANT BEACH — The Point Pleasant Beach Cultural Arts Committee on Tuesday hosted its first Meet the Artist event of the year, giving guests an opportunity to step into the art and creative process of local artist Steve Schreiber.
A Howell native, many of Schreiber’s oil paintings, prints and pencil drawings focus on human beings as their subjects and take into account the viewpoints of those subjects, with Schreiber depicting them in a way informed by his “mind that collects” these different images.
“I grew up not far from here in Howell, right outside Farmingdale,” he said. “I pretty much wore a path from my house to Manasquan…I love the area. I also have a connection to Point Pleasant: I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on jumping off the bridge (on Route 35 between Point Beach and Brielle), but I’m absolutely guilty of having done that when I was younger.”
“My senior prom, too, one of the Point Beach police woke me up on the beach the morning after,” said Schreiber. “With all of these stories I’m blessed and cursed — mostly blessed — to have a mind that collects these pictures, makes a little file and a story with it.”
As he explains it, one of his biggest inspirations is the struggle of indigenous people throughout American history.
“I’ll never stop painting Native American-inspired stuff,” said Schreiber. “I’ve been lucky to get involved with different groups, different tribes. I know people from these communities, and they offer so much. I try to be respectful and they pick up on that.”
One of these paintings, “The Strength of Martha,” depicts a Native American woman with a red handprint across her mouth, wearing a hat that says “Native Veteran” and a shirt that says “The Black Hills.” According to Schreiber, he met the woman, Martha, in Ohio at a powwow where he learned it was a protest intended to draw attention to missing and murdered indigenous women.
“I talked to her a little bit about that, a little bit about other things,” he said. “She was living in Ohio at the time, but she was from a reservation in South Dakota. Since I met her, she’s moved back to the reservation where she got a job with the tribal community.”
He related the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women to 14-year-old Emily Pike, an Indigenous girl from Arizona who was recently found dead after going missing in late January.
His artistic works picturing Native Americans extends back in time as well, with his painting “Stories from the Rising Tide” visualizing the effect of the United States’ westward expansion on indigenous populations. Using a palette of rich browns, rusty reds and grayish blues, this painting depicts several vignettes of both Native Americans and white expansionists across time.
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