At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

Among the works on view is a depiction of American writer and poet Allen Ginsberg. While a student at Columbia University in New York, Ginsberg met William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac, joining a group of writers that would later become known as the Beat Generation. In his work, Ginsberg wrote openly about his identity and gay desire, challenging the obscenity laws of the time and paving the way for younger LGBTQ+ artists and writers to express themselves freely.

While the exhibition primarily comprises paintings, drawing was a fundamental, stand-alone component of Neel's practice, persistently pursued alongside painting. The medium enabled Neel to capture the immediacy of her visual experience—whether in front of her sitters or on the city streets—while also affording a greater sense of experimentation and informality.

One drawing depicts American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich, who had relocated to New York City in 1966. Rich is best known for her seminal 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in which she critiques the assumption that heterosexuality is the default or “natural” sexual orientation for women. Rich argues that this assumption is socially constructed and perpetuated by patriarchal institutions, effectively marginalizing and erasing lesbian existence and experiences and permanently rendering women in subordinate roles. The essay has had a profound impact on feminist theory, LGBTQ+ studies, and broader discourse on sexuality and gender.

Bella Abzug was nicknamed “Battling Bella” for her role as a lawyer, social activist, and for her involvement with the women's movement as a leading figure in ecofeminism. As a lawyer, Abzug focused on labor rights, tenant rights, and civil liberties cases. She was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1970 and was one of the first members of Congress to support gay rights. Abzug, along with Mayor Ed Koch, was responsible for proposing the gay-rights legislation known as the Equality Act of 1974.

At the debut of The Sister Chapel in 1978, where this painting was first exhibited, Neel explained that the depiction of Abzug’s breasts were meant to show that “she would nurture the electorate.” As Abzug herself described, being a feminist was “as natural as breathing, feeling, and thinking.”

In 1972, Neel painted Jackie Curtis, a performer, playwright, and poet who was friends with the artist and was also involved with Andy Warhol's Factory. Curtis performed both as a woman, in drag, and as a man throughout his career. Here, Neel uses shades of bright blue, red, orange, and purple to render Curtis’s face, which echoes the make-up that he would have worn onstage. This is one of two nearly identical paintings Neel made of Curtis; the other is in the collection of Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins, France. Curtis also appears in an earlier painting, Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd (1970), that is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio.

In Als’s catalogue introduction, he writes: “For a long time I thought that being gay was politics enough—difficult enough—but then when I looked at Neel’s portraits of Jackie Curtis and others, I saw the disaster and beauty inherent in becoming a self and realized it occurs not only within the subject’s body, but in the eye of the world. I loved Geldzahler and others for their outright queerness even as I recoiled from their love of hierarchy and power. Neel’s portraits of queer thinkers, artists, and beings taught me that what I was drawing back from, ultimately, was affect, and what I was looking for—what Alice Neel painted—was the collective uncanny: how, despite the odds, we persisted in being a self no matter how you or the world labeled it.”

Many of Neel’s sitters in the 1970s and ’80s would eventually fall victim to HIV/AIDS, including artist Brian Buczak (1954–1987), who was the partner of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks. Buczak and Hendricks met Neel in the fall of 1977 at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where Hendricks taught at the time, following a slide lecture Neel delivered on campus. Buczak and Neel maintained a friendship over the following years, with the younger artist occasionally returning to Neel’s apartment for visits. In 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS, and he died in 1987 at the age of thirty-two.