Artist Talk: Jordan Casteel

Tune in for a live online talk with New York–based artist Jordan Casteel, who will be joined in conversation by Curator of Contemporary Art, Eungie Joo.

Casteel’s painting Aurora (2020) is a large-scale portrait of creative director Aurora James — founder of the 15 Percent Pledge — originally conceived for the cover of Vogue’s September issue in 2020. “What’s most exciting to me,” Casteel told Vogue, “is being given artistic integrity and being able to choose the person to be my sitter — someone who reflects a portion of my own identity — and then to do that truly in the medium of my choice. This is the way that I speak to the world.”

This work displays in the gallery installation On Beauty on Floor 2, within Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture, 1900 to Now.

About the Artist

Jordan Casteel has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. Casteel’s solo museum exhibitions include Within Reach (2020) at the New Museum in New York, and Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, presented at both the Denver Art Museum (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (2019–20). Casteel is an Assistant Professor of Painting in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.