Jordan Casteel Presskit In Her First Solo Museum Show, Jordan Casteel’s Humanizing Portraits Get Even Closer JANUARY 15, 2019 by DODIE KAZANJIAN In 2012, Jordan Casteel and her mother drove across the country from Denver to New Haven, Connecticut, with a wooden easel in the back of a 2001 Subaru Outback. The easel was a gift from her corporate-lawyer father and soon made her a source of merriment among her savvier classmates at Yale’s School of Art, who knew that even figurative painters no longer used the rickety contraptions. But nobody worked harder or learned faster than “Jordy.” “I was like a sponge,” she tells me as we sit in her Manhattan studio, where I’ve come to visit her on a brisk fall day. “I just wanted to learn everything from everyone.” Her receptiveness went beyond the classroom, extending to her family, specifically her two brothers. “I knew them as poets and writers and skateboarders and full human beings,” she says, “rather than what could be perceived by the world as different.” She began making paintings of nude black men, and here her liberal-arts educa- tion “kicked in,” she says. She researched extensively, absorbing how the black male body had been sexualized and criminalized in this country. Her paintings would not show her subjects’ genitals, she decided. Skin tones merged pinks with browns, greens, and purples; perceiving blackness, her work implies, is not a simple matter. Above all, the emphasis is on individuality and humanity. In her large-scale portraits, subjects look you in the eye. Three years later, when she read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me”, a literary letter from the author “to his young son, advising him on the beauty and danger of his skin color, she felt that Coates had “put words to something that I was doing in the Photographed by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue, February 2019 paintings.” Those nude portraits, exhibited in her first solo show, at New York gallery Sargent’s Daughters in 2014, three months after she graduated from Yale, launched Casteel’s career. Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s dynamic director, saw the show, and in 2015 bestowed one of the highly coveted museum residencies on the then 27-year-old artist. The show also caught the eye of gallerist Casey Kaplan, who knew immediately that he wanted to work with her. Within two brief years, Casteel was recognized as one of the rising stars of her generation, making her mark in the ancient and decidedly unfashion- able field of portrait painting—and, in the process, making it cool all over again. In 2017, New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz At our first meeting, Casteel greets me at the door of her studio with a big hug. She’s much taller than I am—five feet ten or more—with close-cropped hair and oversize glasses, dressed in a brown hoodie and jeans. She had warned me that the stu- dio was relatively empty because so much work had just been picked up for her first solo museum show, a 29-painting survey at the Denver Art Museum called “Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze,” which opens this month. “It’s a homecoming for me,” she says. “That’s where I was born.” The studio, which is far from empty, is clearly too small to contain Casteel, her bursting ambition, and her unused easel. A lot of bare canvases in various sizes lean against the walls, each with a photograph taped to it to indicate the image she has in mind. There’s also a large, nearly finished painting of a dapper gent in a straw hat and tan jacket, standing in front of a display of men’s shirts. “The past year has been sort of an exploration of black-owned businesses in Harlem,” the 29-year-old painter tells me. “This is Orlando, who has a suit shop on 125th Street. I’m a little impatient, so I work fairly quickly. Everything happens in one sitting.” Not exactly true. A Casteel painting starts with photographs of the subject, 200 or 300 sometimes, which she then studies. Out of this, an image evolves in her head and becomes the painting. “No one photograph is directly reflected,” she says. In the process, she and the subject form a deep connection. “Jordan collects people,” says Rebecca Hart, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum. “She may not know her subjects when she first photographs them, but they become part of her life.” And she, in turn, becomes their advocate, making visible what has been largely invisible. In this, you could say that Casteel is carrying on the family business of social advocacy and civil rights, not in words but in paint. Her maternal grandfa- ther was Whitney M. Young Jr., the president of the National Urban League throughout the turbulent 1960s. (Casteel was named after Vernon E. Jordan Jr., who succeeded her grandfather as head of the National Urban League and is a close family friend.) Her grandmother Margaret Buckner Young was a well-known educator and children’s-book author who served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and several big corporations. “She was a huge advocate for the Harlem School of the Arts,” Casteel says. Whitney Young died before Jordan was born, but “Grams,” who moved from New York to Denver when Jordan and her twin brother were born, was a grounding presence for her. Though raised in New York, Casteel’s mother, Lauren, is now a local powerhouse in Colorado—president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, a philanthropist, and the former host of three community TV shows, interview- ing everyone from Muhammad Ali to Michelle Obama. “She was the Oprah of Denver,” Jordan tells me admiringly, “and a real model for me of how to use your voice actively in the world.” Photo: Jason Wyche. Boarded, 2018. Oil on canvas, 36″ x 30.″ Image courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. Growing up with two brothers (her twin and an older sibling), Jordan was happiest when she was off by herself making things—baking cupcakes, knitting scarves and blankets, assembling mobiles. “For Christmas, all I ever wanted was a box of stuff from Michael’s craft shop,” she remembers. She was captain of the field-hockey team and played soccer and bas- ketball, but claims her athletic skill was limited. “I was tall and had big hands, but I couldn’t shoot to save my life.” Although her grandparents collected Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the idea of being an artist never occurred to Casteel until her junior year at Agnes Scott College, a small liberal-arts institution in Georgia. During a semester abroad in Tuscany, she took a class in oil painting. “All I had to do was go to the studio, drink cappuccinos, look out over the valley, and come up with projects. The opportunity to focus on art was profoundly satisfying. I found myself at ease, capable, and free within the medium of oil paint, and that brought me great joy. very distinctly remem- ber thinking that this was something I could do for the rest of my life.” When she got back to Georgia, she changed her major from sociology and anthropology t Io studio art. By this time she was also managing a lupus diagnosis she had received in her freshman year—a complex regimen of medication, weekly visits to the doctor, acupuncture, and getting nine hours sleep every night. She was determined, however, that this would not interfere with a full and active life. After graduating, Casteel went back to Denver and joined Teach for America, working in special education. She loved teaching but felt that the brief training she’d received was inadequate, a disservice to her students. Her goal shifted; she would get an MFA so she could teach art on a college level and do her own painting on the side—being an artist full-time still didn’t seem feasible. “Those ambitions were not there yet,” she says. When the University of Colorado in Boulder offered her a scholarship to their graduate program, her mother asked, “But what’s the best school?” They went online; Columbia, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale were at the top. “I didn’t want to apply to Yale, because there was a $100 application fee,” Casteel says. “My mom said, ‘If you don’t get in, I’ll pay you back.’ ” After seeing a portfolio of portraits she had made of family friends and her Teach for America students, Yale offered her a spot. Casteel is very much aware of the other figurative artists, many of them women and men of color, who have emerged in the last few years: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Titus Kaphar, Jennifer Packer, Elizabeth Colomba (whose studio is next to Jordan’s), Toyin Ojih Odutola (her studios are on floors six and ten), Amy Sherald, and Aliza Nisenbaum. “It’s beautiful to be part of a collective of women and portraitists who are seeing the world through our own individual lenses and giving ourselves permission to share that,” she tells me. “Lynette winning the Carnegie International Prize this year is like all of us winning it.” At the same time, she recognizes their distinctiveness: “All of us have tapped into our own voices, which set us apart even in the same form of portraiture.” She’s also aware of such important predecessors as Alice Neel, Barkley L.