Alice, Neel, Uptown

Alice Neel: Uptown gathers Neel's portraits of African-American, Latino, Asian and other sitters of color, with texts by the writer and curator Hilton Als.

David Zwirner Books and Victoria Miro published the catalogue for the 2017 exhibitions of Neel's paintings and drawings at David Zwirner in New York and Victoria Miro in London. Als writes short texts on individual works that give each sitter's history. The people shown include the playwright and author Alice Childress, the sociologist Horace R. Cayton Jr., the community activist Mercedes Arroyo and the academic Harold Cruse, along with a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman and a local kid who ran errands for Neel. Jeremy Lewison, adviser to the Estate of Alice Neel since 2003, wrote the foreword on her interest in the variety of people around her in uptown New York. Laura Lindgren designed the 144-page hardcover, which has 57 color reproductions.

Neel (1900–1984) is known for a humanist approach to the figure, and called herself a “collector of souls.” Als, whose first book, The Women, appeared in 1996, received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017.