About the Artist
Steff Rocknak and Gut Check, 2019.
Venues for Steff Rocknak's work have included The Smithsonian (Washington D.C. and NY, NY), The Grolier Club (NY, NY), The Tampa Museum of Art (Tampa, FL) and the windows of Saks 5th Ave in New York City. In 2011, she sculpted a model for Robert Morris, which was digitally enlarged to 9-feet tall, cast in bronze and permanently installed in The Gori Collection, Fattoria di Celle, Pistoia, Italy. The following year, she was selected from a pool of 265 artists to create a bronze statue of Edgar Allan Poe in the city of his birth, Boston, MA. This sculpture was permanently installed in the fall of 2014. In 2018 she was selected from a pool of 340 candidates as one of five finalists for the National Native American Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. In 2019, and she won the Alex J. Ettl Grant, awarded by the National Sculpture Society, NY, NY. In 2020, she was juried into the National Sculpture Society, NY, NY.
Her work has received multiple awards and has been internationally featured/reviewed in over 200 books, magazines, newspapers and blogs, including The New York Times (cover), The Boston Globe (cover), The Huffington Post, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Gizmodo, Juxtapoz and The Annotated Poe (Harvard U. Press): Complete CV (updated 2023).
June, 2018 presentation of the Stage II submission for the National Native American Veteran’s Memorial at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.
Rocknak is a self-taught sculptor, and received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston University in 1998. She specializes in David Hume and the philosophy of art. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and books, including Brain and Mind, Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy and The Humean Mind. Her book, Imagined Causes: Hume's Conception of Objects, was published with Springer; The New Synthese Historical Library in 2013. She is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College. Read some of her philosophical work here and here. For a recent (2018) interview about her work, see What’s it Like to Be a Philosopher?.
Other teaching venues include Haystack, Peters Valley School of Craft, The Carving Studio and Sculpture Center and the Appalachian Center for Craft (Tennessee Tech University).