In 1972 or thereabouts, Walter Steding hitchhiked to New York City from his hometown, Harmony, Pa. He was 21 years old, armed with two brown-bag lunches packed by his mother and a two-year degree from a commercial art school. In Manhattan, he moved into a former utility closet off Union Square. (It came with a sink.)
He was interested in “the aesthetics of sound,” as he put it, and had been experimenting with an electric violin, a synthesizer he built himself and an EEG machine, which measured his brainwaves. With these accouterments, and no musical training, he turned himself into an otherworldly one-man band.
He began performing at various happenings in galleries around the city, using his violin to make weird keening and wheezing sounds, while wearing a biofeedback device strapped to his belt and sporting a pair of flashing goggles that he said were synced to his brainwaves.
For many years, he performed at avant-garde festivals organized by Charlotte Moorman, who played the cello topless. He also performed with a band called Ether Ship, whose members he had met at art school and who were interested in extraterrestrial languages and space travel.
But even among this crowd, his sonic adventures made him an outlier.
Andy Warhol was so charmed by Mr. Steding’s oddball act that he decided to manage him — the first and only act Warhol managed after the Velvet Underground. And he helped Mr. Steding out by giving him odd jobs at his Factory: stretching canvases, mixing paint and chatting up guests like Keith Richards and Georgia O’Keeffe, who showed up to lunch before being photographed for Mr. Warhol’s Interview magazine.
Mr. Steding was also a skilled painter whose distorted portraits recalled the work of John Currin and Fernando Botero, and he began to paint the Factory visitors as they came and went. Yet, despite the Warhol imprimatur, he maintained a life and an art practice on the margins.
To coin a cliché, he was one of the most notable avant-garde artists you may never have heard of.
Mr. Steding died in mid-November at his apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a few days before he was scheduled to perform at a memorial service for Marcia Resnick, a photographer of New York’s downtown demimonde, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He was 75. The cause of death, which was not widely reported at the time, is not yet known, his daughter, Georgeanna Tisdale Steding, said.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Mr. Steding was omnipresent, showing in galleries like White Columns and performing at clubs like CBGB, the Ritz and the Mudd Club. He was the bandleader for Glenn O’Brien’s “TV Party,” the anarchic public-access cable-TV talk show in New York that first aired in 1978 and featured a cast of Mr. O’Brien’s friends, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, then an unknown young graffiti artist; Fab 5 Freddy, the hip-hop pioneer; and Chris Stein and Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie.
In a 2005 documentary about the show, Mr. Stein noted that Mr. Steding’s music, much like the show itself, “was a little incoherent at times — there were a lot of droning, sort of psychedelic passages.”
Ms. Harry added: “He has sort of his own sense of structure when it comes to music. He doesn’t seem inhibited or sort of, you know, coming from a position of being overtrained.”
In the summer of 1979, when Mr. Steding opened for Blondie at Wollman Rink in Central Park, he confounded at least one critic in the audience.
“His bizarre blend of melodramatic theatrics and pulsing beat seemed to amuse the crowd,” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote in his review of the show. “But the reaction might have turned hostile had he not curtailed himself after 15 minutes.”
Even so, Mr. Warhol was determined to make Mr. Steding a New Wave pop star. He helped him record two albums, produced by Mr. Stein, and two music videos, produced by Vincent Fremont, who was then vice president of Andy Warhol Enterprises. Seen now, they are poignant artifacts of the early MTV era, awkwardly lo-fi.
One song, “Secret Spy,” was shot on the piers, now demolished, off Manhattan’s West Side Highway. Mr. Steding is kitted out in black clothing and a formidable black fedora, and attended by a few female bandmates preening in early ’80s drag, all big hair and short skirts. He renders a winsome tune on his violin that is rather more coherent than his usual atonal fare.
“We worked hard,” Mr. Fremont, who did most of the work of managing of Mr. Steding, said. “But we didn’t get any traction.”
Of Mr. Steding, he added: “Andy really believed in him, and he didn’t lend his name to just anybody. There was an innocence about Walter and a mischievousness that was appealing. He just thought in a different way from other people and didn’t know how to promote himself consistently.”
Mr. Steding was a free spirit, Ms. Harry pointed out in the “TV Party” documentary — “a practicing free spirit.”
Walter George Steding was born on Sep. 7, 1950, in Pittsburgh, the second of four children of George and Gloria (Irwin) Steding. His father was a mechanic.
The family moved to Harmony, a small rural borough north of the city, when Walter was 8. He later attended the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts college, where Keith Haring studied for a time. (It closed in 1980.)
In New York City, Mr. Steding nested lightly, at first shuttling between his utility closet and the apartments of girlfriends. He lived for a while in a loft owned by Mr. Warhol on Great Jones Street, until Mr. Basquiat moved in. Then he roomed with Mr. Stein in Mr. Stein’s loft in TriBeCa and couch surfed with other friends. Two decades ago, when Mr. Stein moved upstate, Mr. Steding took over the lease on his most recent apartment, in Greenpoint.
He supported himself by painting portraits, which number in the hundreds. Taken together, they are a compelling document of Manhattan’s underground creative class from the Warhol era. When Mr. Steding was really in a pinch, friends like Mr. Fremont or Mr. O’Brien, who had already helped him out by commissioning portraits of their families, would ask Mr. Steding to paint their dogs, which he rendered with the same strange acuity and touch of menace that he brought to his human portraits.
In addition to his daughter, from a relationship with Elizabeth Tisdale, an artist, Mr. Steding is survived by his siblings, Bonnie Beckey and James and Raymond Steding.
When Mr. Steding first arrived in Manhattan, he found a cache of letters written by a 19th-century ship’s captain that had been stored in crates and then left on a sidewalk near the Factory. The letters sparked something in him, and he began researching the maritime trade routes of the period and the merchants who had made their fortunes from them. He continued collecting ephemera from that time for the rest of his life, and paid homage to the captain with a song, “Captain Henry,” and a portrait.
In May 2025, Mr. Steding began a residency with Silver Art Projects, an organization that provides visual artists with studio space for a year on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.
There, he was planning to build a cardboard model of a ship called the America, a trading vessel that had been converted into a privateer during the War of 1812. It wasn’t Captain Henry’s ship, but it was similar, and it had an exciting back story.
Gregory Thornbury, the executive director of Silver Art, said the piece “was going to be an elegy to the lost promise of America the country, and how it’s turned from a place of freedom to a nation of corporate pirates — so there was an element of anticapitalism in it.”
At least, that was what he thought Mr. Steding was after, he said.
Voluble and prone to digressions, Mr. Steding hadn’t precisely articulated his vision. His studio remains as he left it, strewn with notes, photocopies of his paintings, a sketch of a frigate and other naval artifacts.
“He was like a throwback to another time,” Mr. Stein said this week. “Adrift in modern society, but still comfortable.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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