Jordan Casteel

American

b. 1989

‘Painting becomes a tool to get people to see the multiplicity of ourselves: our sadness, our joy, our love, our loss, our moments of stillness, the moments that don’t get heard. In that strange way, every painting becomes an opportunity for me to give a little slice of myself.’

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A magnetic sense of proximity and directness defines the work of Denver-born and New York–based artist Jordan Casteel. Renowned for her bold, larger-than-life compositions that combine luminescent colour with sinuous, intricately detailed brushwork, she collects impressions of her communities and the vibrant displays of humanity she encounters there. Whether tracing the textures and topographies of her neighbourhood or the natural ebb and flow of her surroundings, Casteel makes visible her fleeting observations of daily life, and conveys a kinship with her landscape. Her subjects – who are always a direct reflection of the communities she inhabits – almost always return the artist’s gaze. ‘What we see when we look at one of Jordan’s portraits is her ability to represent her subjects in their fullness,’ notes Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. ‘She is able to capture a sense of spirit, a sense of self, a sense of soul.’

Over the course of her career, Casteel has developed a uniquely empathetic approach to storytelling that draws on her own interest in anthropology and sociology, as well as the work of figurative painters including Alice Neel and Bob Thompson. Her portraits are intimate studies enriched with captivating detail, where her subjects’ stolen glances or interlaced hands are rendered with the same painterly care as the subtleties of their environments. Casteel forgoes the formality of the traditional studio sitting – in which power dynamics between artist and model are implicit – and captures her subjects in the very places she discovers them. For Casteel, authentic connections with the members of her community provide the foundation for authentic image-making. ‘I am meeting people where they are,’ she explains, ‘as opposed to asking them to enter my space.’ Photography plays a critical role in her practice, though no one photograph becomes the painting alone. The numerous snapshots she takes serve as an expansive memory of relational time and place. In her celebrated Subway Series, an ongoing body of work begun in 2015, train carriages become perfect backdrops for looking – fellow commuters become the artist’s unsuspecting subjects, offering another lens for observation alongside her portraiture.

Over the course of her career, Casteel has developed a uniquely empathetic approach to storytelling that draws on her own interest in anthropology and sociology, as well as the work of figurative painters including Alice Neel and Bob Thompson. Her portraits are intimate studies enriched with captivating detail, where her subjects’ stolen glances or interlaced hands are rendered with the same painterly care as the subtleties of their environments. Casteel forgoes the formality of the traditional studio sitting – in which power dynamics between artist and model are implicit – and captures her subjects in the very places she discovers them. For Casteel, authentic connections with the members of her community provide the foundation for authentic image-making. ‘I am meeting people where they are,’ she explains, ‘as opposed to asking them to enter my space.’ Photography plays a critical role in her practice, though no one photograph becomes the painting alone. The numerous snapshots she takes serve as an expansive memory of relational time and place. In her celebrated Subway Series, an ongoing body of work begun in 2015, train carriages become perfect backdrops for looking – fellow commuters become the artist’s unsuspecting subjects, offering another lens for observation alongside her portraiture.

Painting is a meditative process for Casteel that allows her to reflect on both her inner and outer worlds, exploring ideas of interconnectedness and her own identity. ‘Through painting, I have the opportunity to honor the landscape of my life and all the people who have played a huge part in it,’ she says. As Casteel’s settings change, so do the landscapes she honours. Since establishing a home in the Hudson Valley alongside her base in Harlem in early 2021, she found new opportunities to embrace and incorporate the natural elements of her more rural surroundings. Pansies, magnolias, daffodils, dahlias and sunflowers – the flowers that bloom and grow in her garden – emerge from intuitive, dappled brushstrokes and brilliant swathes of colour. Treated with the same dignity as the figures who populate her portraits, these works mark the artist’s deepening engagement with themes of cohabitation and symbiosis, as well as nurture, ephemerality and belonging.

Jordan Casteel lives and works in New York. Having first enrolled as a sociology and anthropology major, she received her BA in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College in 2011, and MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2014. From 2016 to 2021, she taught as an associate professor of painting at Rutgers University–Newark – the series of portraits she made of her students there were hung in the first room of her acclaimed solo museum show Within Reach at New Museum, New York (2020). In 2024, Casteel was the subject of a solo exhibition spanning the past decade of her practice at the Hill Art Foundation, New York. She has also presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Denver Art Museum (2019); and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (2019–20). In 2019, New York's High Line Art commissioned a 1,400-square-foot mural of Casteel’s painting The Baayfalls. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021), the John Koch Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024) and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (as of 2023).

Casteel’s work was recently included in The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2024, which travelled to The Box, Plymouth; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. The artist has also participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); Baltimore Museum of Art (2023); Saint Louis Art Museum (2023); New Orleans Museum of Art (2023); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2023); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021–23); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020); the Art Institute of Chicago (2021); and the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (2018).