Juliette Steele was born in Union City, New Jersey in 1909. Raised in Eastern New Jersey, she attended the Traphagen School of Fashion, an art and design school in Manhattan, in the late 1920s. In the early 1940s, she moved to San Francisco with her second husband, Percy Cyril Edward Steele, where she enrolled in courses at San Francisco State College (now known as San Francisco State University), completing her undergraduate work there. She later received an MFA degree from Stanford University while launching her professional career during the beginning phase of the post-war Bay Area art scene. Subsequently attending the California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute), she studied with leading printmakers such as Ray Bertrand and Stanley William Hayter. She eventually became part of the school’s faculty, working alongside Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still.
The 1940s and 1950s were significant in Steele’s career, as she exhibited her paintings and prints regularly and received numerous accolades. Her work from this time ranges from geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism to modernist figurative compositions. She held her first solo exhibition at the Artists Guild Gallery in San Francisco in 1947, exhibited with other printmakers in New York the following year, and was given a solo exhibition at Seattle’s Kharouba Gallery in 1949. Her work was also featured in annual exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to being an active member of various local art associations, Steele was the president of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists in 1949 and 1950.
Steele’s works can be found in the collections of the Laguna Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, and Worchester Art Museum, among others.