Casey Kaplan
Jordan Casteel | 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
We are thrilled to congratulate Jordan Casteel on the incredible achievement of being named a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The MacArthur Fellowship is awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.
Casteel has established a figurative language saturated with the presence of her subjects, whose invisible energy she captures through gestural brushwork and bold swathes of color. Depicting people and landscapes within and around her community, Casteel takes up questions of subjectivity and representation by examining the gestures, spaces, and forms of non-verbal communication that underpin the genre of portraiture.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) received her BA from the Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA (2011) and her MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel’s solo exhibition “Within Reach” at the New Museum, New York, NY, brought together nearly 40 paintings spanning her career to date. A fully illustrated catalogue was published on the occasion, including interviews and essays by Thelma Golden, Dawoud Bey, Lauren Haynes, and Amanda Hunt. Casteel’s work has recently been included in exhibitions at institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2021); Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2021); The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2021); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (BAMPFA) (2021); San Francisco Museum of Art, CA (SFMOMA) (2020); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (MCA) (2020).
In 2019, High Line Art commissioned a larger-than-life mural of “The Baayfalls,” a 2017 painting that depicts Fallou, a woman Casteel befriended during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, and Fallou’s brother, Baaye Demba Sow, extending the Harlem sidewalk to the High Line park. Other public art projects include Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY (2021) and Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2020). Also in 2019, an exhibition of Casteel’s work titled “Returning the Gaze” travelled from The Denver Art Museum, CO to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA, presented in conjunction with a monograph that included texts by Elizabeth Alexander, Isolde Brielmaier, and Greg Tate. Casteel’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (MoMA); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (MOCA); San Francisco Museum of Art, CA (SFMOMA); Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (PAMM); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; and Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA. Casteel lives and works in New York.
About the MacArthur Fellowship Program
The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.
More information available at macfound.org