Jordan Casteel on the art of being seen Artist Profile

By Gazelle Mba

[...] Casteel’s work has the studied intimacy of a photo album, images united by circumstance and careful consideration. Her paintings are a visual counterpart to the literature of Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, which unfurls into a living collective biography. They are not an end in themselves, but a record of the effort and skill of creating closeness.

Casteel, speaking to me one cold April morning at her studio in Woodstock, describes how the early period upstate recalled other beginnings in her life. ‘It was uncertain what this decision would mean for me personally, and what living up here would mean for my work,’ she says. ‘But I remembered showing up at the Studio Museum for my residency in 2015, and I had been mostly making paintings of my family, friends and people from grad school.’ She didn’t know the community and didn’t know where to begin, so she started by doing what came most naturally to her, ‘introducing myself to people, staying curious about the environment, about other people’, she says. “The painting practice just became a way for me to say, ‘Hi, my name is Jordan.’ Where’s everybody at is the core of the practice.’ [...]