Steve Poleskie

Steve Poleskie (born Stephen Francis Poleskie; June 3, 1938 – December 21, 2019) was an American artist, printmaker, aerobatic pilot, performance artist, and writer. He founded Chiron Press, described as one of the first fine-art screen-printing studios in New York City, and produced prints for artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

Poleskie later taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he developed what he called "Aerial Theater": large-scale, time-based drawings made in the sky by flying an aerobatic biplane and releasing smoke in choreographed patterns. Contemporary critics, including the Italian curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti and the French critic Pierre Restany, described this work as a continuation of Italian Futurism and as a form of "planetary art", placing it in dialogue with late-20th-century performance, environmental, and land art practices.

His work as a printer, performer, and educator has been cited in histories of American Pop art, postwar printmaking, and experimental performance art. Poleskie also wrote fiction and nonfiction, including a biographical novel about American Civil War balloonist Thaddeus S. C. Lowe.