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.
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).
2024
Jordan Casteel: Field of view, Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA
2023
Recent Landscapes, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA
2022
In Bloom, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA
2020
Within Reach, New Museum, New York, NY, USA
2019
The Baayfalls, High Line Art, New York, NY, USA
The Practice of Freedom, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA
Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
2017
Nights in Harlem, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA
Jordan Casteel: Harlem Notes, Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte, NC, USA
2015
Brothers, Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY, USA
2014
Visible Man, Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY, USA
The Gaze, The Study, Aisling Gallery, New Haven, CT, USA
2025
Works on Paper, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, NY, USA
2024
Ancestral: Afro-Americas [United States and Brazil], Museu de Arte Brasileira, São Paulo, Brazil
A New Subjectivity 1979/2024, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, NY, USA
Day for Night: New American Realism, Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Rome, Italy
Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA
The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; The Box, Plymouth, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, USA
2023
Kindred Worlds: The Priscila and Alvin Hudgins Collection, Hudson River Museum, New York, NY, USA
Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism, Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY, USA
Femme Noire, blackpuffin, Wa Na Wari, and Seattle Art Museum, Central District, Seattle, WA, USA
In Our Eyes: Women’s, Non-Binary, and Trans Perspectives From the Collection, Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, FL, USA
In New York, Thinking of You, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA
The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO, USA; Schirn Kunstalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA; Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Rear View, LGDR, New York, NY, USA
2022
Dark Light, Realism in the Age of Post Truth, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA
Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, USA
Women Painting Women, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, FL, USA
2021
Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Spelman College of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, USA; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, USA
New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, USA
Crystal Bridges at 10, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, USA
Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future, collection display, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA
Multiple Voices/Multiple Stories, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA
The Obama Portraits, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
A Face Like Mine, The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT, USA
and i will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA
The Human Body, Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA
Where the threads are worn, Casey Kaplan, New York, NY, USA
Rituals of Resilience, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Let Freedom Ring Vol. 2, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, USA
2020
You Are Beautiful the Way You Are, an initiative by Modou Dieng and Djibril Drame, Blackpuffin, Dakar, Senegal
Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture, 1900 to Now, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA
Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum of Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA
Uptown Triennial 2020, Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
50 Artists: Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York, NY, USA
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, USA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, USA; Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, USA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, USA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, USA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA, USA
Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Tell Me Your Story, Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort, Netherlands
2019
Side by Side, Dalton Gallery, Decatur, GA, USA
Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, OSilas Gallery, Concordia College, Bronxville, NY, USA; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY, USA; Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA; Lehigh Art College, Bethlehem, PA, USA; The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA; Vicky Myrhen Gallery at Denver University, Denver, CO, USA
Every Day: Selections from the Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA
Punch, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Harlem: in Situ, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, USA
Trance, Aishti Foundation, Antelias, Lebanon
She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, New York, NY, USA
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, USA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, USA; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI, USA
2018
One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Both, and, Stevenson, Cape Town, South Africa
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, USA
2017
Regarding the Figure, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
The Half-Life of Love, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA
March Madness, Fort Gansevoort, New York, NY, USA
Occupancies, 808 Gallery, Boston University Art Galleries, Boston, MA, USA
Man Alive, Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Brussels, Belgium
2016
Do You See Me?, Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
Tenses: Artist in Residence 2015–16, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA
Intimisms, James Cohan, New York, NY, USA
Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, HOME, Manchester, UK
Learning to See Color, Vicki Myhren Gallery, University of Denver School of Art, Denver, CO, USA
2015
Thats On Me, Paris Blues, Harlem, NY
Color II: Identity and Society, Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, USA
2014
Sargent's Daughters, Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY, USA
MFA Thesis Exhibition, Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
13 Artists, 24/6.106.353.v.1 Alternative Space, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2013
For ED: Splendor in the Grass with Olympic Lad and Lass, Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
Second-Year Graduate Student Exhibition, Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2012
First-Year Graduate Student Exhibition, Green Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
Celebrating the Culture of African-American Art, A Brookfield Invitational Exhibition at the Republic Plaza, Denver, CO, USA
2011
Yasan: 100 Year of Womyn’s Struggle Ceremony and Sword, Sellars Project Space, Denver, CO, USA
CIAO: I Direttori, Terminus 100, Atlanta, GA, USA
Collage Arts Colloquium, Dalton Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA, USA
USA
The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
The Dean Collection, New York, NY
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
The Ford Foundation, New York, NY
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC
Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2024
John Koch Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2021
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence Award, Rutgers University
The New York Women’s Foundation Honoree
2019
Hirshhorn Gala Artist Honoree
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University Gala Inaugural Artist Honoree
Challenge Coin recipient presented by Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock
2018
Forbes, 30 under 30
NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Program Painting Finalist
2013
Gloucester Painting Prize Recipient, Yale School of Art
2011
Dalton Art Gallery Award