In Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel's approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them.
Hilton Als is a writer with focus in theater criticism. He became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994, a theater critic in 2002, and chief theater critic in 2013. His book White Girls (2013) discusses various narratives around race, identity, gender, and sexuality, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Alice Neel was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. With a practice spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s, Neel is widely regarded as one of the foremost American painters of the twentieth century. Based in New York, Neel selected her sitters from among her family members, friends, neighbors, and a variety of New Yorkers, and her eccentric portraits are thus a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Although she showed sporadically early in her career, from the 1960s onward her work was exhibited widely in the United States. In 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
"Alice Neel's incisive, personal portraits fill the pages of
Uptown, by The New Yorker's Hilton Als."--Staff "New York
Magazine"
"It's a fully human depiction, and it doesn't use the black or
brown body to advance what Als calls an 'ideological cause.'
Benjamin as rendered by Neel is simply a black child, being. How
powerful is that? Like Als on the page today, Neel's paintings then
captured all that she loved about the city, which is to say she
imaged figures she knew had to be seen to be remembered."--Antwaun
Sargent "Interview"
"In lieu of a single essay, Als intervenes between the paintings
with ruminations on individual images. He fixates on the young man
in Call Me Joe, 1955...He lingers on the exquisite watchfulness of
the sallow-skinned, blue-frocked girl clutching a blonde baby doll
in Julie and the Doll, 1943..."--Kate Sutton "BOOKFORUM"
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