At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

Alice Neel’s unstinting, visionary engagement with the lives of those around her resulted in an inclusive oeuvre. This aspect of queer representation in her work is explored for the first time in this new catalogue.

Curated by Hilton Als and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Alice Neel, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World highlights the artist’s vibrant involvement with the human condition and extends the reach of her recent retrospectives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Barbican, and the Centre Pompidou. Within a lifetime of painting, Neel painted many people from many walks of life--this catalogue is the first to focus on queer communities and those who circled within them. This collection of paintings includes rarely seen works of individuals including Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as the bohemian theorists, Greenwich Village activists, artists, and politicians who populated these spaces.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at David Zwirner in 2024, this catalogue accompanies Neel’s first significant exhibition in Los Angeles. Edited and with a text by Als, the volume includes newly commissioned contributions by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

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.

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 most recent book, White Girls (2013), discusses various narratives around race, identity, gender and sexuality, and was nominated for a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Alex Fialho (he/they) is an art historian, curator, and PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. Fialho’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among others.

Evan Garza is a curator, scholar, and a Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Their writing on the work of global contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by IMMA, The Drawing Center, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.

Wayne Koestenbaum--poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, and filmmaker--has published over twenty books, including The Queen’s Throat, Camp Marmalade, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, and many more. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and nonfiction writer. Her twentieth book is Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, NY 1987-1993.