With their bright colors, energetic compositions, and spirited vernacular titles, Steven McCallum's paintings belong to a heroic American tradition that includes artists such as Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. McCallum's work is set apart by its postmodern approach to color, shape, space, and pattern, adding a whole new idiom, at once elegant and slangy, to the language of contemporary abstraction.

McCallum was born in Alliance, Ohio, in 1951 and received an MFA from Kent State University in 1976. He has exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and in Sweden. He has been awarded grants from the Gottlieb Foundation and the New York State Arts Council. His works are in collections that include the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.