I first saw this portrait of Stephen Schafer by Alice Neel at the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art when my class Portraiture as a Medium was choosing pieces from the collection for a gallery talk in Winter Semester 2024. I immediately recognized it was an Alice Neel from the loose brush strokes, the expressive and somewhat unnatural color palette, and the flat background emphasizing the figure. I had just come back to �ֲ���ý from my Junior semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. While studying there, I took a trip to Oslo, Norway where I visited the Munch Museum which happened to have an Alice Neel exhibition on view. I had never heard about her or seen her work before, but became absolutely fascinated with her ability to capture the colorful integrity and diversity of everyday people in New York City. As someone from New York myself, I felt an immediate connection to her work. Through depicting New Yorkers from all walks of life, races, and professions, Neel is able to bring out the raw energy and individuality that makes the city so special. Although I ultimately chose a different work from the collection, I am thrilled to now have another chance to explore this portrait of Stephen Schaefer. It is so exciting to be able to work first hand with a painting by such a renowned woman artist–especially one that I resonated with so strongly while working at the �ֲ���ý Museum.  

Neel is known for her colorful and naturalistic portraits that ooze with the sitter’s personality. This portrait of Stephen Schaefer embodies her signature mark-making defined by a slight distortion, bold outlines, and creative color choice. She lived and worked for twenty years at her apartment in Spanish Harlem, New York.¹ In working from home, Neel was able to create a calm, casual, and trusting atmosphere where her sitters could feel comfortable. The sense of comfort is evident in the way her subjects pose. She would talk to her models so that they would ease into a natural positioning. We can see this here through Schaefer’s relaxed body language with his legs crossed and hands resting on his knees. His body is devoid of tension or stiffness; in fact, he is almost slouching over his crossed legs. Although Neel paints his eyes with a piercing blue, his gaze into the distance off the left side of the canvas is calm.  

Through capturing Schaefer in a moment of genuine ease rather than a staged performance, this portrait feels refreshingly unposed. Schaefer wears worn-in, classic blue jeans and a loose cotton t-shirt. His unshaven face and bare feet further emphasize the laid-back environment when posing for Neel. He appears to have sat down for the portrait as he was, wearing the clothing he would on any other day. This element of Neel’s work sets her apart from traditional themes in portrait painting. Historically, portraiture was reserved for wealthy or royal patrons. In these works, sitters would wear their finest garb as a means of communicating their financial, social, or political status. Neel, on the other hand, employs portraiture to celebrate ordinary individuals, depicting them in their most authentic state. 

Her choice to sometimes distort elements of her subjects, such as Schaefer’s uneven eyes and disproportionately long fingers and toes, reject idealization and highlight humanity and honesty. Her approach pushes the traditional boundaries of portraiture that focus on exhibiting wealth and power by capturing diverse and candid lived experiences of human beings. She also may be referencing early twentieth-century modernist and expressionist styles from Europe through the emotional intensity, abstracted and exaggerated forms, and bold colors.² 

By incorporating these influences and references, Neel’s work is unmistakably unique. Even before she rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s, she made conscious efforts to forge her own identity. Although she was born in Philadelphia, in the 1930s Neel moved to the Greenwich Village Neighborhood in New York City where she painted portraits of artists, left wing writers, and trade unionists.³ However, in 1938, she intentionally distanced herself from the dominant art world centered in Greenwich Village, feeling that it was too insular and trendy among artists, and moved uptown to Spanish Harlem.⁴ During her time living in Spanish Harlem, and then later the Upper West Side, Neel immersed herself into the everyday lives of working class New Yorkers. Even as she rose to fame during the 1970s and extended her sitters to prominent figures of the time such as Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Frank O’Hara, Neel remained steadfast in her commitment to portraying the complex, real, and dynamic people around her–those often overlooked by traditional portraiture–whether they be her neighbors, notable figures, or strangers.⁵����

1. Jason Farago, “Alice Neel’s Love of Harlem and the Neighbors She Painted There ,” New York Times, February 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/arts/design/alice-neel-harlem.html. ↩︎
2. “Biography,” Alice Neel, September 7, 2023, https://www.aliceneel.com/biography/. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎

Bibliography

Als, Hilton. “The Inclusive Humanity of Alice Neel’s Paintings.” The New Yorker, February 4, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-inclusive-humanity-of-alice-neels-paintings. 
“Biography.” Alice Neel, September 7, 2023. https://www.aliceneel.com/biography/. 
Farago, Jason. “Alice Neel’s Love of Harlem and the Neighbors She Painted There .” New York Times, February 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/arts/design/alice-neel-harlem.html. 
Silver-Cohen, Romy. “Alice Neel (American, 1900-1984).” MoMA, 2021. https://www.moma.org/artists/4253.

When I first looked at Back by Isabella Kirkland, I was intrigued by the busyness in the painting. Contrasted with the black background, the work displays an explosion of plants and animals out of the void. The animals and plants are full of life; the colors are vivacious, but abruptly stop at the black background. A key to each animal with both its common and scientific name on the artist’s website showed her interest in depicting specific animals that viewers can identify. The animals themselves vary; an owl is surrounded by lemurs, a kakapo or taonga picks at a whooping crane egg, and snakes and a frog linger at the bottom, barely noticeable amidst all the other larger animals and white flowers. The species coexist in the same timeless space, as if they would share the same habitat in real life. Her other similar works also follow this chaotic interweaving of flora and fauna–animals and plants appearing out of (and disappearing into) a black background. 

I was interested in why all the plants and animals were chosen, and it led me to more of Kirland’s work, where she has made several pieces about taxidermy and animal anatomy. In particular, she uses techniques from seventeenth-century Dutch masters, including their methods of identifying plants and animals, to discuss how human activity may lead to the extinction of much of the life she paints. The animals and plants in this painting were on the brink of extinction, but then were brought “back”–hence the title–underscoring the impact of human practices on numerous species. 

Her paintings balance themes of time, nature, and human interference. She believes in the importance of using her practice to communicate threats about human destruction to nature, stating, “I choose to apply accuracy in a different service: my analog and intentionally durable works in oil reflect selected flora and fauna of earth that may well outlast the species depicted in them.” In painting each animal and plant as its own character in the story she is telling, sometimes interacting with their prey or predator, she reiterates nature’s liveliness, interdependence, and precariousness.  

Although this piece is alluring, aesthetic, and detailed, I felt slightly unsettled while looking at it. The Madagascar Red Owl near the top of the piece stares at the viewer as if confronting us with the damage we are doing to its home. At the bottom of the piece, eggs from several species of birds suggest the possibility of new life teeming in the future. The fact that the eggs have not started to hatch, however, suggests this also hangs in the balance. On her website, Kirkland draws specific attention to the Owens Pupfish. It was listed as federally endangered in 1967 and almost went extinct in 1969 if not for a biologist and his colleagues. It is notably the only animal in a glass fishbowl, as if Kirkland has deemed it unsafe for the fish to exist without protection, even in a fictional world. 

The animals in this work will continue to fascinate me in the diverse species they represent and the way they are physically placed in the painting. They immerse us humans in their world. However, the ominous black background also reminds us all that the world we live in is fragile and temporary, and if we don’t protect it, the natural world will fade into nothingness.

Sources:

I was thinking about the way people use bigoted language. It’s almost a physical act. It’s like you are throwing something at someone. I began doing these experiments where I would just write something and think about the delivery of it. According to how you wrote it, it could be a slogan, or perhaps something even more indifferent, a statement. Is this being said as an accusation? A description? ¹

Throughout his work, Pope.L explores race, labor, capitalism, and materiality while foregrounding the bodily experience to render ideas more visceral. Though most notably celebrated for his performance art, multidisciplinary artist Pope.L was equally invested in writing. In fact, poetry was Pope.L’s first introduction to creative expression. In a 1989 BOMB Magazine interview with Martha Wilson, the artist ruminates on his early memories caught in the rapture of spoken poetry in his kitchen. He recounts his mother and aunt quoting Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes, “laughing and bubbling it up. It was neat. Then my Aunt or my Uncle would respond, making up their own lines. And it would fly like that. Like freestyling rap it would take on a life of its own.”² From a young age, Pope.L sensed the power, joy, and creativity that stemmed from the written word. As a burgeoning artist freshly graduated from Montclair State University in the 1970s, Pope. L continued to dedicate himself to poetry, more so out of necessity; “I knew I was going to be as poor out of school as I was while in school. Writing was a very portable thing I could do.”³ 

Most potent in these anecdotes for me are the connections that reveal themselves between writing and physicality. The poems introduced to Pope.L early in his life were not stagnant, two-dimensional texts tied down to a sheet of paper. Rather, they were charged with life and given shape, form, and breath; The vibrating tremor of his aunt’s voice and her oscillating breath mediated by the acoustics of his kitchen created a notion of language for Pope. L that was palpable, bodily, and site-specific. Furthermore, his proclivity for writing’s portable quality highlights his negation of object or artifice for a preference for what is always available–the body, our surroundings, a pen, some paper. Writing’s stripped down nature and its relationship to movement as something that you can carry with you anywhere correlates directly to its own physical practice of drawing ink across paper. Even when not explicitly enacted through the body, much of Pope.L’s work is charged with a sizzling physicality, including his text-paintings, like this one in the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art’s collection.

At first glance, Contest appears as a text more than anything else. Stark black words seep up from their murky-white backdrop as if wet and soggy. The letters are oddly shaped, slightly smeared by white paint, and they bob up and down in wavering bands. From a distance, this work transmits light-heartedness and joy. Its white backdrop is laced and dotted with bright pastel colors, and a photograph in the center depicts a man and a woman laughing on a rowboat in the sunshine. Not long into looking at this work, however, the words crystallize and quickly complicate the collage’s seemingly joyful temperament. The text is an incongruous assemblage of words spliced with racial slurs, made-up words, and stunted with question marks. It is hard to discern, and incites uncomfortability and curiosity. 

Searching for more information, I look closer to find pen illustrations of body parts: ears, hands, and many lips, large and pillowy. Small cut-out faces of white boys smile at me, in a frozen and creepy sort of way. In miniscule writing, addendums hide: such as, under the rowboat image, “Many Contests Come by Boat.” Scanning over the black words again, I respond viscerally; the fragmented statements are chucked at me in short spurts. As a whole, the work’s layered haziness, and its jumbled, mixed-up pot of words and images elicit a feeling of troubled frenzy. It is alive in movement and cluttered with sound. The frayed left edge of the work tells us the paper was once torn. Pink paint ceaselessly drips. Lips pucker. Mouths pry open. Hard T’s cut the air. Suddenly the whole work feels like it’s going to suck me into its cloudy, cacophonous mess. 

“It’s not that I have the arrogance to believe that I know what should be done,” Pope.L  told Martha Wilson in the BOMB Magazine interview. “In fact, I’m afraid of the responsibility, but something should be done. And if I can construct works that allow people to enter themselves, thus, enter the mess – then it’s a collaboration and maybe, possibly, who knows, why not – I’ve nudged something.” In this work, Pope.L pulls the viewer–their entire sensing and bodily self–into the complexity of racism, consumerism, and capitalism. He explores the sonority and movement of bigoted language and magnifies racial stereotypes. The large puckering lips, for example, seem to depict the stereotype that Black people have big lips. “Everybody’s A Winner! Take Home A Dozen.” seems to be a nod to consumerist-oriented American game shows. The small addendum “Many Contests Come by Boat” might reference the arrival of Europeans by boat, the stealing of Indigenous peoples’ land, and the ensuing and ongoing cycle of violence and exploitation. Playing with both poeticism and abstraction, Pope.L seeks to describe the feeling and the effect of hateful language over its literal meaning or direct references. 

As a dance-artist interested in durational and experimental modes of performance, I first came across Pope.L’s work through personal research. As he also happened to have been a Professor of Theater and Rhetoric at �ֲ���ý College from 1990 to 2006, his presence echoes in the very spaces I occupy everyday. As an early museum intern, I remember filling up with intrigue upon hearing about how Pope.L’s use of everyday objects can pose a challenge for museum preservation. When deciding on a work to write about that spoke to me in the collection, a Pope.L work seemed obvious to return to three semesters later, as this artist has continuously captured my curiosity. 

While this work is in our collection, Pope.L is most well-known for his . In these provocative disruptions of public space, the artist drags himself against hot summer asphalt, moving in a contradictory way to the monotonous churning of a great corporate machine. Through these crawls, the artist practiced obtaining a new perspective and prompted passersby to also shift their awareness downwards. Embodying a kind of horizontality that referenced the growing houseless population of the time–to which Pope.L was closely related with his father and aunt living on the streets– Pope.L attempted to bring awareness to a rising and personal issue.⁴ In realizing this work, he wondered, “Is there a way to align myself with a people who have less than I do (materially) without making fun of them? I decided to literally put myself in the place of someone who might be homeless and on the street. I wanted to get inside that body. Like, what does it feel like?”⁵ 

Pope.L takes an extreme approach to kinesthetic empathy and invites his audience to experience his art in similarly visceral ways. He is intent on shaking viewers up, probing bodily reactions and writing in bold those taboo issues that are sometimes easier to ignore. Pope.L reminds us that these issues exist whether we decide to look at them or not, and shows us that their effects are often stored and left to fester in the body. As a dance-artist, it was Pope.L’s commitment to embodying these complex issues that first drew me into his work. As an audience member, now having spent time with this piece in the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art’s collection, I am left contemplating my role in perceiving it. Are people interacting with this work just as integral to its meaning as its own physical components–its text, illustrations, and magazine cut-outs? Through its leaking and disruptive nature, Contest incites dialogue, interaction, and builds an interconnected relationship between audience and art–ultimately crafting an experience of viewing that latches on to us, and one that is, afterwards, hard to shed.

1. Basciano, Oliver, “I’m not Jeff Koons!’ – the endurance crawls, weird texts and guerrilla brilliance of Pope.L,” The Guardian, 2021. ↩︎
2. Wilson, Martha, “William Pope.L,” BOMB Magazine, 1989. ↩︎
3. Basciano, “I’m not Jeff Koons!” The Guardian, 2021. ↩︎
4.  “Pope.L. Is Making a Commitment to Art.” Louisiana Channel on YouTube, May 18, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs5QkK20M4. ↩︎
5. Wilson, Martha, “William Pope.L,” BOMB Magazine, 1989. ↩︎

This gorgeous print entered the museum’s collection at the close of the exhibition Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography. The artist, James Cormier, answered the museum’s call for submissions to the juried portion of the exhibition by sending two similar prints, both of which were accepted and toured with the exhibition when it traveled to the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie and the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Looking at Departing Clouds takes time. Just as when one stargazes, the eye has to get used to searching for subtle shifts of value; what initially seems like impenetrable shadow is, on closer examination, an area that holds tenebrous–yet discernible–detail. The photograph portrays the rugged, rocky coast of Downeast Maine in black-and-white, with the view looking out to sea under a night sky. The rocks’ sturdy and static appearance is diametrically opposed to that of the clouds, sky, and surf, all of which are depicted blurred or streaked due to their motion during the photograph’s long exposure. On viewing the image, I accept its invitation to ponder time and impermanence. The stars – aeons old– etched images on the camera’s negative with light born thousands of years ago; their arced traces describe Earth’s twenty-four hour rotation on its axis. The ocean’s pounding waves are averaged out to a gentle blur over the minutes required to expose the film, making them seem insufficient to the task of slowly smoothing and eroding the rock shoreline.

When I encounter Departing Clouds, my mind also turns to thoughts about connections. The ocean is connected to terra firma by a constantly shifting coastline, and the Earth is connected to the Moon through gravity, the invisible force that endlessly pulls the tides from low to high and back again. And gravity connects us to the stars seen as streaks in this photograph, despite their astronomical distance from us. With Departing Clouds, boundaries seem to dissolve, and I experience a calming sense of connection to the cosmos. And the minutes I spend gazing at this picture connect me to those the artist spent standing out on the rocky coast of Maine, gazing at the stars though the clouds, distilling time, motion, gravity, all into an image of disarming simplicity.

Departing Clouds, along with other images shown in Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography, is reproduced in .

“What’s intriguing about interiors is what they have to say about the people who live in them.” 

– Shellburne Thurber¹

Photographer Shellburne Thurber depicts the physical spaces where intimate experiences occur–and the loss of those memories and places over time–through her series of abandoned homes, psychologist offices, motel rooms, emptied city buildings, and deceased family members’ residences. In these, saturated colors in the layers of walls and windows infuse an eerie emotional tenor where the presence of people is still palpable, although past. 

Using light, color, framing, and angles, Beechwood: Blue Bedroom with Graffiti and Damaged Wall—from her series of abandoned homes in the South—creates a familiar yet uncomfortable emptiness that immediately caused me to pause.² As a scholar within the intersections of place and art, and a curator who recently mounted an exhibition about domesticity and aesthetic practice in the Arkansas Ozarks, I am called to sit with Thurber’s Home series.. It is surprisingly devoid of notions of romanticism, the Southern Gothic, nostalgia, or stories of hardship that so often plague images related to the South. Instead, it is filled with a quiet, honest, and impactful reverence for the lives lived in these environments.  

As I have seen in my work, homes escape notice, often because they are so familiar to us. But, just like portraying the human figure might represent an essence of personhood, Thurber sees these photographs as portraits of the unnamed people who once inhabited them, and of the artist herself, who conveys her experience interacting with the essence of the home. With the masterful play of light, the opaque and diffused sun, and the walls’ layered graffiti and colors, her photography transforms this forgotten place into a type of vernacular spiritual architecture. Thurber’s images are not merely in color; they radiate with it, so saturated that their light and color seem to glow from within, and give a new life to these decaying interiors.³ 

Devoid of many objects, in Beechwood, we can only make conjectures about who picked out the baby blue wallpaper for the bedroom and why. Very present are the layers of graffiti, like those in bar bathroom stalls that argue with one another through paint and marker. This is a literal writing on the wall of life after domesticity. But rather than depicting the graffiti as sinister, it too is part of the full picture portrayed with soft light, equaling out the stories. Since this series of photographs was taken in the 1990s, it is hard not to place these texts on the wall within the context of the Satanic Panic era when –especially in the South—adults struck out against teenagers who wore black, played violent video games, and listened to metal as potentially participating in murderous satanic cults. Perhaps these graffitiers were teenagers playing out this battle in real time through the abandoned home’s walls. These former inhabitants and interlocutors are defined, not by what they took, but by what they chose to leave behind. Thurber’s spaces, though, are not in torment; they are quiet, peaceful, and accepting.⁴ Of these layers, Thurber states, “I’m interested in how these houses have provided protection for these people that I don’t know.”⁵

Thurber emphasizes that these are her experiences in homes as part of her own grappling with loss, change, and decay in the human experience and present within our own bodies. Her work is inspired by phenomenological artists who play with space, color, and light to change spaces, experiences, and emotions, like James Turrell and Marc Rothko. Her work retains some similarity to the interiors of Jeffery Becton, who had a solo exhibition at �ֲ���ý in 2015. Whereas Becton creates altered realities rich in symbolism through digital montages, she does not superimpose or manipulate her photography, preferring to remain in the present with the conditions at hand in the environment..

These works also remind me of Alec Soth, specifically Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), but Soth’s sense of place and abandonment deals with specific places and people, as well as the time-based artist’s journey, while Thurber’s pieces depict intimate spaces that could be anywhere. She has also been placed with the Boston School of photographers like Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe, who centered closeness through the act of photographing. These artists saw the self as architectural as well, surrounded by what they inhabited.⁶ 

Thurber still uses the architectural interior as a metaphor for people; “I’ve always seen homes as surrogates for human presence. Homes are places that supposedly nurture you and protect you. In that way they’re an architectural stand-in for the mother.”⁷ This mothering Thurber found through photographing the places her own mother frequented in order for the artist to better know her after her death. This activated Thurber’s process of photographing interiors. Yet Thurber refuses to fetishize objects—those crumbling homes that everyone loves to snap as they pass by—even while her own meditative process of light, space, and personal life seep through her work to focus on an inner reality of decay, loss, and reverence.⁸  Perhaps, her photographs lie somewhere in between interpretations, giving them this enigma that skirts the line between truth and mystery— and made me stop at this photograph of an old home interior in the first place. 

Citations

1 Home: Photographs by Shellburne Thurber, (Boston: ICA Boston, 1999) 4.

2 Ibid.

3 Lee Zacharias, “Shellburne Thurber’s Southern Home,” Southern Cultures, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Fall 2004), 32.

4 Ibid., 46.

5 Home, 14

6 Lia Gangitano, editor. Boston School (Boston: The ICA, Boston/Primal Media, 1995) 12.

7 “Shellburne Thurber’s Southern Home,” 35.

8 Ibid., 50.