by Emily Burkhart
July 26, 2023
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Jabari, 2013, from the Visible Man series. Oil on canvas, 72 x 52 in. Image courtesy of Jordan Casteel.com.
A contemporary artist named Jordan Casteel (b. 1989) uses portraiture to bear witness to people of color who are often either overlooked or fetishized by the art world. Her bold, painterly style on large canvases incorporating saturated color has drawn comparison to such esteemed artists as Alice Neel, Henri Matisse, Jacob Lawrence, and Nancy Spero. Like Alice Neel, Casteel paints everyday people. She also cites Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Faith Ringgold, Charles White and Jacob Lawrence of the Harlem Renaissance as influences. Casteel’s focus on the Black and Latinx community grew out of going to museums as a child and not seeing anyone who looked like her on the walls.
Jordan Casteel, photographed by David Schulze, 2021. Image courtesy of Culture Type.
Background
A native of Denver, Colorado, Casteel was born in 1989 to Charles and Lauren Young Casteel. She has both a twin brother and an older brother. Social advocacy and civil rights run in Casteel’s family. Her mother is president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado and her father is a trial lawyer specializing in product liability. She was named after Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a family friend, who succeeded her grandfather Whitney Young as head of the National Urban League. Her grandmother, Margaret Buckner Young, was an educator and children’s book author.
Casteel did not set out to be an artist. She originally majored in sociology and anthropology at Agnes Scott College, a private liberal arts school in Decatur, Georgia, until her junior year when she took a class in oil painting while studying abroad in Cortona, Italy. The experience had a profound effect and upon returning to Georgia, she changed her major. Casteel graduated in 2011 with her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art.
After a brief stint working in special education for Teach for America, she went on to get a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking in 2014 from Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. As a student at Yale, Casteel participated in several group exhibitions including 13 Artists in 2014, a historic show featuring the works of all black artists, a first for Yale, curated by then-classmate, the Ethiopian-American artist Awol Erizku. From 2015-2016, she was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She then taught as Associate Professor of Art at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 2016-2021 and in 2021 was named a MacArthur fellow.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Jordan 2020, 2020. Oil on canvas, 90 x 78 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Art
Jabari (2013), from Visible Man
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Jabari, 2013, from the Visible Man series. Oil on canvas, 72 x 52 in. Image courtesy of Jordan Casteel.com.
Casteel’s first major painting series was called Visible Man, a group of male nudes whose title was inspired by and is in counterpoint to the title of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, The Invisible Man. The subjects of these paintings were fellow students during her time at Yale. Jabari (2013) is one of these. Sunlight filters through a delicate white lace curtain illuminating the pale brown skin of Jabari seated in a wooden rocker. He stares thoughtfully at the viewer, his brow furrowed, hands clasped against his cheek. The painting is a study in light and shadow using shades of brown, red, ochre, tan, and yellow to create Jabari’s glowing skin, his navel, a nipple. There is some bulging arm muscle, lean thighs and calves, an arch of a foot, bony knees and feet. He appears at once wiry yet vulnerable and sensual.
Cornelius (2014), from Visible Man
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Cornelius, 2014, from the Visible Man series. Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Another work from the Visible Man series is Cornelius (2014), painted from above looking downward as the man sits on the floor amid a pile of clothing, a hanger, some shoes. He gazes upward with an eyebrow raised quizzically. Elbows rest on bent knees, one hand clasps the wrist of the other, hands and shadow incidentally conceal the crotch. Casteel employs a somewhat darker palette with more vivid red, brown, and yellow hues for the person here than in Jabari. As with all of Casteel’s Visible Man paintings, the sitter’s genitalia is obscured. There is no need to fetishize or objectify the male body. A tenderness emerges as she chooses instead to emphasize the humanity and vulnerability of her subjects even amidst a pile of laundry.
Zen (2017), from Nights in Harlem
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Zen, 2017, from Nights in Harlem Series. Oil on canvas, 95 x 60 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Casteel’s artistic process often involves neighbors, students, and people she meets on the street. She takes a multitude of photographs that she then studies in detail. Drawing upon these photographic likenesses for inspiration, an image evolves and becomes the final painting. “No one photograph is directly reflected,” she said in a January 15, 2019, interview with VOGUE magazine. Casteel’s Nights in Harlem series featuring people and Black-owned businesses in Harlem reflects this approach.
The painting Zen (2017), for example, depicts a dreadlocked red-capped man with beard and sunglasses pausing comfortably while out for a walk with his two dogs. He rests on a wooden post with white graffiti on it next to a dark fire hydrant with bright flecks of maroon. In the background across the street are businesses with apartments above. Partly visible behind the man’s back are the words “nail spa” and “food.“ There are two parked cars whose outlines reflect the yellow orange color of the dogs and street. A tiny figure stands outside the restaurant, rendered in the same tones. The painting is a study of contrasting colors and highlights–red cap, blue shirt, yellow dogs, golden street.
Tito (2017), from Nights in Harlem
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Tito, 2017, from Nights in Harlem series. Oil on canvas, 60 x 78 in.
Image courtesy of Jordancasteel.com.
Another Nights in Harlem painting is Tito, also from 2017. It portrays a man perched on the edge of a folding chair. He is seated in front of a mural with two other portraits that may be youthful and older versions of each other because they share the same facial characteristics–brown eyes, arched eyebrows, dimples, high cheekbones, broad nose, soft smile. The titular Tito’s own smile mirrors those of the men portrayed behind him. His hand gesture with thumbs touching and both index fingers raised may be a meta commentary on all the levels of framing going on in the picture.
Tito is a vivid presence–his skin tone, brightly patterned sneakers, the blue of his jeans and denim shirt, contrasting with the men in the oval “frames” on the wall behind him who are rendered monochromatically. The Spanish words written on the wall beneath the portraits, Estos…Jim, literally means “These Jim” in English. The painting seems playful but what exactly Casteel is signaling here is a mystery.
Benyam (2018), from Returning the Gaze
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Benyam, 2018, from Returning the Gaze series. Oil on canvas, 90 x 78 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Casteel paints students, pedestrians, and business owners alike as she sees them with dignity. She has explained that these “portraits are about engaging with my community, or my landscape, with mutual respect." An example of this is Benyam (2018). It features the owner and her two sons of the popular Ethiopian restaurant, Benyam, in Harlem, that Casteel patronizes. The family poses at the restaurant counter each one gazing directly at the painter/viewer with familiarity. The son on the right who wears a gray bucket hat with the colors of the Ethiopian flag on it smiles slightly. The mother’s careworn face with furrowed brow also subtly smiles. She wears an African headscarf and black apron. The son in the middle leaning over the counter seems to challenge the viewer. He wears a sky blue baseball cap with the word Queens imprinted upon it. A quickly sketched wall in the background shows wine glasses and other bar accouterments in addition to pictures and art.
Magnolia (2022), from In Bloom
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Magnolia, 2022 from the In Bloom series. Oil on canvas, 78 x 60 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
In addition to portraiture, Casteel also paints the flowers in her garden and the landscape outside her home in the Catskill Mountains. Some of these were featured alongside portraits in the 2022 exhibition, In Bloom, at the Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York City. Magnolia (2022), depicts a magnolia tree just past peak flowering with intensely white and purplish-pink blossoms. Fallen petals cover the ground. A bluish-gray shed and gray bench behind the tree blend with the colors of the branches. Painted against a cloudy sky and from the perspective of looking down as though from an upper window, the blossoms seem to burst from the frame in the foreground.
Commissions
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), God Bless The Child, 2019 from The Practice of Freedom series. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Casteel’s painting God Bless the Child (2019) from The Practice of Freedom series was featured on the cover of TIME magazine’s May 2021 issue on racial justice called Visions of Equity. The painting evokes maternal love, showing a mother with her young daughter cradled in her arms on her lap ostensibly in a New York City subway car. One year later, Casteel was included in the 2022 TIME100 Next issue as an artist to watch.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), God Bless The Child, 2019. TIME May 24/May 31, 2021. Image courtesy of
Casteel was also commissioned to design a cover for VOGUE magazine’s September 2020 fashion issue. She painted the African American fashion designer and activist Aurora James wearing a blue Pyer Moss dress, in honor of James’s new 15 Percent Pledge, which challenges major retailers to reserve 15 percent of their shelf space for products made by Black-owned businesses. The rooftop painting has since been acquired by Pamela J. Goyner and Alfred G. Guiffieda for long-term loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Aurora, 2020. Oil on canvas, 90 x 78 in. Image courtesy of Artnet News.
In December 2019, Casteel was invited to recreate her 2017 painting, The Baayfalls, as a mural for the High Line park in Manhattan at 22nd St where it was on view until Fall 2021. The painting is a double portrait of Fallou, a woman Casteel met during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and her brother Baaye Demba Sow. The pair are seated at a table outside the museum where Fallou sold the hats she designed. Notably, the shirt she wears reads: “I am not interested in competing with anyone. I hope we all make it.” When Baaye 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 the Baayes are members. The gesture Fallou makes with her left hand signifies Allah among members of Baye Fall. The mural has since been replaced as part of an ongoing rotation.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), The Baayfalls, 2017. Oil on canvas, 90 x 78 in. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Photograph of The Baayfalls mural at The High Line at 22nd Street, New York, NY, December 2019–Fall 2021. Image courtesy of jordancasteel.com.
Recognition
Casteel’s first major solo exhibition was in her hometown at the Denver Art Museum in February 2019, featuring thirty paintings of subjects from her neighborhood in Harlem spanning the four years from 2014-2018. Since her acclaimed exhibition Jordan Casteel: Within Reach at the New Museum in February 2020, her first major New York City solo show, her works have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and exhibited abroad. Also in 2020, Casteel’s 2013 portrait of her mother entitled simply Mom and made while she was a student at Yale, sold for 515,250 British pounds ($666,734), twice the original estimate of 180,000-250,000 pounds at Christie’s London auction on February 12, 2020, setting a new world record for the artist who was only thirty years old at the time.
Jordan Casteel (b. 1989), Mom, 2013. Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in. Image courtesy of Culture Type.
In 2021, Casteel was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship, a prestigious award given to up and coming artists with a $625,000 stipend paid out over five years. Awarded annually by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the fellowships are intended to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” More recently, her work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
Casteel and her husband, the Australian-born photographer David Schulze, divide their time between an apartment in Harlem and a house in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. She is jointly represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York City and Massimo de Carlo Gallery, with locations in Milan, London, and Hong Kong.
If you enjoyed learning about Jordan Casteel, please check out her website, jordan casteel.com, for more information and further examples of her work.