At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World

Alice Neel's unstinting, visionary engagement with the lives of those around her resulted in an inclusive oeuvre. This aspect of queer representation in her work is explored for the first time in this new catalogue.

Curated by Hilton Als and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Alice Neel, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World highlights the artist’s vibrant involvement with the human condition. Within a lifetime of work, Neel painted many people from many walks of life –– this catalogue is the first to focus on queer communities, those who were part of their circle, as well as allies and others with whom the artist was in broader conversation — together forming a collective portrait that both embodies and complicates an understanding of the queer world of Neel’s moment and the artist’s place within it.

This collection of paintings includes rarely seen works depicting individuals including Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Adrienne Rich, as well as writers, artists, friends, and advocates. As Als notes, this book includes “not just portraits of gay people but those of theorists, activists, politicians, and so on who would qualify as queer by virtue of their different take in their given field and thus the world. So doing, they reflect Alice’s own interest in and commitment to difference.”

The catalogue accompanies Neel’s first significant exhibition in Los Angeles, at David Zwirner in 2024. Edited and with a text by Als, the volume includes newly commissioned contributions by Alex Fialho, Evan Garza, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

About the Authors:

Alice Neel (1900–1984) is widely regarded as one of the foremost American artists of the twentieth century. Working from life and memory, Neel depicted those around her with unfazed accuracy, honesty, and compassion.

Hilton Als is a writer with focus in theater criticism. He became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994, a theater critic in 2002, and chief theater critic in 2013. His most recent book, White Girls (2013), discusses various narratives around race, identity, gender, and sexuality, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

Alex Fialho (he/they) is an art historian, curator, and PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. Fialho’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among other institutions.

Evan Garza is a curator, scholar, and a Curatorial Exchange Initiative Fellow at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Their writing on the work of global contemporary artists has been published in several books and monographs and by IMMA, The Drawing Center, Flash Art, ART PAPERS, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.

Wayne Koestenbaum — poet, critic, fiction writer, artist, and filmmaker—has published more than twenty books, including The Queen’s Throat, Camp Marmalade, Humiliation, Hotel Theory. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and nonfiction writer. Her twentieth book is Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, NY 1987–1993.