DENVER, CO.- The Denver Art Museum opened Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, an exhibition of about 30 paintings by Denver-born artist Jordan Casteel, who is now based in Harlem, New York. This presentation represents Casteel’s first major museum exhibition, and provides audiences with a first look at new work by one of the most acclaimed emerging artists working today. The exhibition showcases Casteel's large-scale portraits that depict the black subjects who drive her practice. Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, is on view Feb. 2, 2019 through Aug. 18, 2019, in the Gallagher Gallery of the Hamilton Building at the DAM. Following its debut at the DAM, it will travel to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University from Sept. 25, 2019 to Jan. 6, 2020.
“It is an honor to present Jordan Casteel’s first solo museum exhibition in her hometown and to share the power of her canvases with local audiences and visitors to our city,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Casteel’s stories of individuals are based on personal experience, revealing the importance of human connection in our lives and elevating our everyday interactions through portraiture.”
Organized and curated by Rebecca R. Hart, Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the DAM, Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze features largerthan-life portraits that depict individuals from her immediate community. The exhibition brings together a body of work made from 2014 to 2018, revealing Casteel’s evolving practice and a shift in subject matter ranging from cityscapes and subway scenes to women and local business owners. Her early series, Visible Man (2013-2014) and Brothers (2015), portray family and close friends and include details that deepen our understanding of the subjects through elements such as furnishings, personal belongings and place.
“The intent of the paintings from my early works is to expose my vision of black men as a sister, daughter, friend and lover,” said Casteel. “That perspective is one full of empathy and love. I see the humanity and, in turn, I want audiences to engage with them as fathers, sons, brothers, cousins—as individuals with their own unique stories to share.”
Casteel’s 2017 series, Nights in Harlem, focuses on expanding her close circle of subjects through an investigation of light and color by engaging members of the Harlem community at night. Casteel’s approach to identifying subjects involves walking around her neighborhood and taking photographs. By transforming these images into portraits, Casteel reveals individuals and surroundings that often go unnoticed.
A recent work titled Benyam (2018), spotlighting the shift of Casteel’s subject matter, features a matriarch in a family-operated Ethiopian restaurant that Casteel frequents. Depicted in a moment of leisure, their casual poses and riveting gazes suggest the warm hospitality and familial atmosphere they share with customers. Casteel exudes a confidence about this as she comments, “[They] offered their spirits for a painting.”
“Casteel has the power to capture our attention by posing her sitters so that they often look you directly in the eye, leading to deeper understandings of the intent behind the artwork,” said Hart. “By titling the exhibition Returning the Gaze, we acknowledge the levels of engagement within Casteel’s art: she gazes at the subjects, who often look out at the viewer with inviting eyes, which then prompts us to think about the sitter and consider the empathy that the artist has for the people that she paints.”
