Alice Neel: Uptown

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Description

Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als on Alice Neel’s quietly political portraits of her uptown New York neighbors

Known for her portraits of circle of relatives, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists and more, Alice Neel (1900–84) created forthright, intimate and, every now and then, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues. In Alice Neel, Uptown, creator 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 incessantly left out of the art-historical canon and how this atypical painter captured them; “what fascinated her was once the breadth of humanity that she encountered,” Als writes.

The publication explores Neel’s interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people among whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress and writer Alice Childress, the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr., the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse, alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman and a local boy who ran errands for Neel.

In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each and every sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, whilst adding his own perspective. A latest and personal approach to the artist’s oeuvre, Als’ project is “an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.”

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