Curator Hilton Als talks to Wallpaper* about At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

…Portraits exhibited here – from Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol and performance artist Annie Sprinkle – encompass both the accuracy and the uncanny psychological insights Neel brought to her work. In this exhibition, a narrow definition of subject is eschewed for a wider celebration of queer communities, extended to include activists and thinkers and ‘those who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world’, says curator Hilton Als. ‘So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.’

Als builds on his extensive experience engaging with Neel’s work, including for the 2017 show, ‘Alice Neel: Uptown’. ‘[There], I noticed a number of themes in her work that hadn’t been mined previously – namely pictures that showed an array of her queer friends. Friends from her life in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A lot of them were artists and a lot of them had working-class roots. I don’t think Alice ever set out to “represent” anything. She painted her myriad, layered worlds. But what I loved – what I saw in the queer pictures – was a kind of family of difference, men and women and others who may have had relatively little understanding in America at that time but complete understanding in Alice’s universe. Ultimately what I loved about these “queer” pictures is what I love throughout her art: empathy devoid of sentimentality. And what’s fluid in these pictures is fluid throughout the work: the exchange between artist and sitter. If sex and gender are part of that, so much the better.’

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Image: Alice Neel, David and Catherine Saalfield, 1982