Casey Kaplan
In Her First Solo Museum Show, Jordan Casteel’s Humanizing Portraits Get Even Closer
January 15, 2019
By Dodie Kazanjian
In 2012, Jordan Casteel and her mother drove across the country from Denver to New Haven, Connecticut, with a wooden easel in the back of a 2001 Subaru Outback. The easel was a gift from her corporate-lawyer father and soon made her a source of merriment among her savvier classmates at Yale’s School of Art, who knew that even figurative painters no longer used the rickety contraptions.
But nobody worked harder or learned faster than “Jordy.” “I was like a sponge,” she tells me as we sit in her Manhattan studio, where I’ve come to visit her on a brisk fall day. “I just wanted to learn everything from everyone.” Her receptiveness went beyond the classroom, extending to her family, specifically her two brothers. “I knew them as poets and writers and skateboarders and full human beings,” she says, “rather than what could be perceived by the world as different.”
She began making paintings of nude black men, and here her liberal-arts education “kicked in,” she says. She researched extensively, absorbing how the black male body had been sexualized and criminalized in this country. Her paintings would not show her subjects’ genitals, she decided. Skin tones merged pinks with browns, greens, and purples; perceiving blackness, her work implies, is not a simple matter. Above all, the emphasis is on individuality and humanity. In her large-scale portraits, subjects look you in the eye. Three years later, when she read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, a literary letter from the author to his young son, advising him on the beauty and danger of his skin color, she felt that Coates had “put words to something that I was doing in the paintings.”
Those nude portraits, exhibited in her first solo show, at New York gallery Sargent’s Daughters in 2014, three months after she graduated from Yale, launched Casteel’s career. Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s dynamic director, saw the show, and in 2015 bestowed one of the highly coveted museum residencies on the then 27-year-old artist. The show also caught the eye of gallerist Casey Kaplan, who knew immediately that he wanted to work with her. Within two brief years, Casteel was recognized as one of the rising stars of her generation, making her mark in the ancient and decidedly unfashionable field of portrait painting—and, in the process, making it cool all over again. In 2017, New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz praised her “profound empathy for the inner lives and consciousness of her subjects,” and declared that she was “prepared to take a rightful place on the front lines of contemporary painting.”
Those nude portraits, exhibited in her first solo show, at New York gallery Sargent’s Daughters in 2014, three months after she graduated from Yale, launched Casteel’s career. Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s dynamic director, saw the show, and in 2015 bestowed one of the highly coveted museum residencies on the then 27-year-old artist. The show also caught the eye of gallerist Casey Kaplan, who knew immediately that he wanted to work with her. Within two brief years, Casteel was recognized as one of the rising stars of her generation, making her mark in the ancient and decidedly unfashionable field of portrait painting—and, in the process, making it cool all over again. In 2017, New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz praised her “profound empathy for the inner lives and consciousness of her subjects,” and declared that she was “prepared to take a rightful place on the front lines of contemporary painting.”
“The past year has been sort of an exploration of black-owned businesses in Harlem,” the 29-year-old painter tells me. “This is Orlando, who has a suit shop on 125th Street. I’m a little impatient, so I work fairly quickly. Everything happens in one sitting.” Not exactly true. A Casteel painting starts with photographs of the subject, 200 or 300 sometimes, which she then studies. Out of this, an image evolves in her head and becomes the painting. “No one photograph is directly reflected,” she says. In the process, she and the subject form a deep connection. “Jordan collects people,” says Rebecca Hart, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum. “She may not know her subjects when she first photographs them, but they become part of her life.” And she, in turn, becomes their advocate, making visible what has been largely invisible.
In this, you could say that Casteel is carrying on the family business of social advocacy and civil rights, not in words but in paint. Her maternal grandfather was Whitney M. Young Jr., the president of the National Urban League throughout the turbulent 1960s. (Casteel was named after Vernon E. Jordan Jr., who succeeded her grandfather as head of the National Urban League and is a close family friend.) Her grandmother Margaret Buckner Young was a well-known educator and children’s-book author who served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and several big corporations. “She was a huge advocate for the Harlem School of the Arts,” Casteel says. Whitney Young died before Jordan was born, but “Grams,” who moved from New York to Denver when Jordan and her twin brother were born, was a grounding presence for her. Though raised in New York, Casteel’s mother, Lauren, is now a local powerhouse in Colorado—president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, a philanthropist, and the former host of three community TV shows, interviewing everyone from Muhammad Ali to Michelle Obama. “She was the Oprah of Denver,” Jordan tells me admiringly, “and a real model for me of how to use your voice actively in the world.”
Growing up with two brothers (her twin and an older sibling), Jordan was happiest when she was off by herself making things—baking cupcakes, knitting scarves and blankets, assembling mobiles. “For Christmas, all I ever wanted was a box of stuff from Michael’s craft shop,” she remembers. She was captain of the field-hockey team and played soccer and basketball, but claims her athletic skill was limited. “I was tall and had big hands, but I couldn’t shoot to save my life.” Although her grandparents collected Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the idea of being an artist never occurred to Casteel until her junior year at Agnes Scott College, a small liberal-arts institution in Georgia. During a semester abroad in Tuscany, she took a class in oil painting. “All I had to do was go to the studio, drink cappuccinos, look out over the valley, and come up with projects. The opportunity to focus on art was profoundly satisfying. I found myself at ease, capable, and free within the medium of oil paint, and that brought me great joy. I very distinctly remember thinking that this was something I could do for the rest of my life.” When she got back to Georgia, she changed her major from sociology and anthropology to studio art. By this time she was also managing a lupus diagnosis she had received in her freshman year—a complex regimen of medication, weekly visits to the doctor, acupuncture, and getting nine hours sleep every night. She was determined, however, that this would not interfere with a full and active life.
After graduating, Casteel went back to Denver and joined Teach for America, working in special education. She loved teaching but felt that the brief training she’d received was inadequate, a disservice to her students. Her goal shifted; she would get an MFA so she could teach art on a college level and do her own painting on the side—being an artist full-time still didn’t seem feasible. “Those ambitions were not there yet,” she says. When the University of Colorado in Boulder offered her a scholarship to their graduate program, her mother asked, “But what’s the best school?” They went online; Columbia, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale were at the top. “I didn’t want to apply to Yale, because there was a $100 application fee,” Casteel says. “My mom said, ‘If you don’t get in, I’ll pay you back.’ ” After seeing a portfolio of portraits she had made of family friends and her Teach for America students, Yale offered her a spot.
Casteel is very much aware of the other figurative artists, many of them women and men of color, who have emerged in the last few years: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Titus Kaphar, Jennifer Packer, Elizabeth Colomba (whose studio is next to Jordan’s), Toyin Ojih Odutola (her studios are on floors six and ten), Amy Sherald, and Aliza Nisenbaum. “It’s beautiful to be part of a collective of women and portraitists who are seeing the world through our own individual lenses and giving ourselves permission to share that,” she tells me. “Lynette winning the Carnegie International Prize this year is like all of us winning it.” At the same time, she recognizes their distinctiveness: “All of us have tapped into our own voices, which set us apart even in the same form of portraiture.”
She’s also aware of such important predecessors as Alice Neel, Barkley L. Hendricks, Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, and Alex Katz. But Casteel’s work stands out because it comes from direct observation of specific individuals, a method that has mostly fallen out of favor even among the new generation of figurative painters. She’s more Neel (or Manet) than Yiadom-Boakye, who imagines the people she paints. And while Casteel is certainly part of a cohort, the emergence of that group is still striking, says Robert Storr, dean of Yale’s School of Art when Casteel studied there. “The discourses in the academic art world are still pretty much against representation. But, in fact, these are people whose worlds have not been portrayed, and it’s significant to do that.”
In her recent “Subway” paintings, seven of which are in her Denver show, Casteel has abandoned, for the moment, the direct eye contact between subject and viewer. The paintings are smaller, and the focus is on details—bodies, hands, clothing—that she photographs surreptitiously on the New York City trains. In Lean, there are no faces, just the back of a man whose young son is trustingly holding on to his dad’s rear pocket. “Hands are very important for me,” says Jordan. “A single hand can hold so much emotion.” One of Jordan’s most vivid early paintings is Mom Hand, an image of her mother’s long, slender fingers resting on one red-stockinged knee.
Last year, Jordan moved into her new Harlem apartment with her boyfriend, David Schulze, an Australian-born photographer she met on the dating app Raya. “I’d been single for five years before I met David,” she tells me. “I’m really ambitious and had my head down. I just didn’t have time.” Schulze, she says, calms her. “He’s very easy and mellow.” Jordan has stayed in touch with several friends she met at Yale’s School of Drama, who are now actors in New York, and she takes great pleasure in seeing and supporting their work. She still bakes and knits—“obsessively”—and has a passion for reading. At the studio, she listens to audiobooks and crime podcasts, but not to music. “Music dictates a mood for me,” she says. She and Schulze are going to spend New Year’s in Melbourne before heading to Denver to install her show.
“I have three full-time jobs,” she says, laughing. In addition to painting and managing her lupus, she’s also a tenure-track professor at Rutgers University. “Students are integral to who I am,” she explains. “So much practice in the studio is centered on self. It’s about me; I’m in my own head. The students require me to come out of that. It doesn’t matter to them if I’m in Vogue or The New York Times. They’re like, ‘Cool, that’s great, Professor. Can we talk about my grade?’ I need that and I need them.”