Hilton Als on Alice Neel's quietly political portraits of Harlem Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists and more, Alice Neel (1900-1984) created forthright, intimate and, at times, humorous paintings that both overtly and quietly engaged with political and social issues. In Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings 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 often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; -what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered, - Als writes. The publication explores Neel's interest in the extraordinary diversity of 20th-century New York City and the people among whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress, and author Alice Childress; the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr.; the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse; alongside those of more anonymous individuals, such as a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman, a local boy who ran errands for Neel, and other children and their families. In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to Alice Neel's oeuvre, Als' project is -an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.-
Author
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic who writes for The New Yorker magazine. Previously, he had been a staff writer for The Village Voice and editor-at-large at Vibe magazine. His 1996 book The Women focuses on his mother, who raised him in Brooklyn, Dorothy Dean, and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als. In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a "Negress" and then an "Auntie Man", a Barbadian term for homosexuals. Als' 2013 book 'White Girls' continued to explore race, gender, identity in a series of essays about everything from the AIDS epidemic to Richard Pryor's life and work. In 2000, Als received a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing and the 2002–03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. In 2004 he won the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, which provided him half a year of free working and studying in Berlin. Als has taught at Smith College, Wesleyan, and Yale University, and his work has also appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books.
