Casey Kaplan
Jordan Casteel
The Baayfalls
High Line Mural Commission
On View December 2019 – December 2020
Location: Adjacent to the High Line at 22nd St
Jordan Casteel is best known for her portraiture. Her vibrant, larger-than-life canvases portray the gazes, gestures, and lives of the individuals who surround her, including family, friends, her students, fellow subway riders, and people she meets on the sidewalk. Casteel works from hundreds of photographs, which allow her to spend hours incorporating the many small details that bring her paintings to life. She paints her subjects as they choose to be seen in their homes or places of work—with friends or family, and the objects that surround them. Inspired by painters such as Alice Neel and Faith Ringgold, Casteel thinks through histories of portrait painting and the ways it creates the world as much as reflects it.
The mural The Baayfalls recreates a painting on canvas of the same name originally made in 2017. The Baayfalls is a double portrait of Fallou—a woman Casteel befriended during her artist residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem—and Fallou’s brother, Baaye Demba Sow. The pair are pictured outside the museum at Fallou’s table, where she sold hats she designed. When Fallou’s brother arrived in New York from Senegal, Casteel asked the two to sit for a portrait. The title references Baye Fall, a sect of the Sufi brotherhood Mouride, of which Fallou’s brother is a member. The gesture Fallou makes with her left hand signifies Allah among members of Baye Fall.
Casteel’s work for the High Line extends the Harlem sidewalk to the park, connecting public spaces of different neighborhoods across the city. Through her portraiture, Casteel adds deeply nuanced expressions of human experience to the expanding collection of images we see every day.