Pastel and acrylic painting on paper shows portrait of yellow and orange woman wearing baby blue eyeglasses and purple lipstick. Her hair is short cropped and green. She wears a gray-striped turtleneck sweater and the background is pink streaked with yellow.

Portrait of Jordan Casteel. Born in 1989, Casteel is an American artist known for her naturalistic figurative paintings of family, friends, and strangers who live around her in Harlem. #art #artsky #painting #painter #traditionalart #jordancasteel

Jamaican artist Wayde McIntosh builds “legacy” through objects as much as likeness and depicts American painter Jordan Casteel in a room that reads like a personal archive where family history, community responsibility, and artistic practice are inseparable. The medium-brown skin of Casteel almost glows she turns slightly towards us from her seat on a couch. She rests her head on one hand in a relaxed but guarded pose, meeting us with a steady, thoughtful gaze. Her short, dark curls frame her face as large, round black tinted eyeglasses catch the light. She wears a black zip-front graphic hoodie with printed text and figures partially visible on the chest. The couch is layered with patterned fabric and cushions, including a bright red pillow and a soft, gray, furry throw at the right edge. Behind her, a tall tapered wooden bookshelf rises like a backdrop with book spines stacked tightly, while long green plant vines cascade down. Pinned or leaning near the shelves are visual signs of public life including a prominent a bold “Black Lives Matter” magazine cover alongside a small flag with red-and-black striping. On the wall to the right, a framed black-and-white photograph shows two men standing with their hands over their hearts, adding a sober, documentary note to the intimate interior. The civil-rights references (including the photo connected to Jordan Casteel’s grandfather (Whitney Young Jr.) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), Black Lives Matter, and David Hammons’s African American Flag link past and present activism without turning Casteel into a symbol alone. She remains a person at home, choosing how much to reveal. Born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, McIntosh, was trained at MICA and Yale before working in New York. He approaches portraits as a collaborative truth-telling so the setting “reinforces the sitter’s history and character,” honoring how Casteel’s own portrait practice insists on dignity, attention, and the right to be seen on one’s own terms.

"Legacy" by Wayde McIntosh (Jamaican) - Oil on Dibond / 2017 - National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #WaydeMcIntosh #McIntosh #JordanCasteel #BLM #BlackLivesMatter #Casteel #SmithsonianNPG #artText #art #BlueskyArt #portrait #NationalPortraitGallery #PortraitofaWoman #Smithsonian

This self-portrait shows American artist Jordan Casteel seated in a vinyl hospital-style chair, body angled slightly toward us while her gaze meets ours head-on. Her medium-brown skin is modeled with saturated strokes of orange, crimson, plum, and purple, giving her face a restless, shifting light. White glasses frame the artist’s steady eyes. A simple shirt and hospital IV emphasize vulnerability more than fashion as an IV line snakes from the upper edge of the image to her exposed forearm, where tape fixes the needle in place. Around and behind her, collaged drawings and handwritten notes from children crowd the wall with things like dinosaurs, hearts, and portraits labeled “Ms. Casteel” to create a halo of student voices. A patterned blanket spills across her lap, its concentric circles and bright yellows, reds, and greens echoing the layered textures of her paint. One parch of the blanket spells the word “hope” no lowercase. This self portrait chronicles a period when Casteel was managing a chronic health condition while teaching in Denver, Colorado just before going to graduate school at Yale. The medical setting makes illness visible, but the composition refuses to reduce her to a patient as she sits upright, centered, and monumental, surrounded by evidence of care from her students. Those collaged letters turn a clinic into a temporary classroom, insisting that her identities as artist, teacher, and Black woman remain intact even under fluorescent hospital lights. The thick, gestural brushwork and unconventional skin tones anticipate the portraits of family, neighbors, and Harlem community members that later made her well-known. Here, she tests that language on herself. By inviting us into an intimate, unglamorous moment, Casteel “returns the gaze” long before her breakthrough museum shows, asserting that Black women’s everyday struggles, tenderness, and resilience are worthy subjects for a large-scale contemporary painting.

“Self-Portrait” by Jordan Casteel (American) - Oil & paper collage with ink, graphite, and colored pencil on canvas / 2012 - Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, Denver Art Museum (Colorado) #WomenInArt #art #artText #DenverArtMuseum #SelfPortrait #BlackArt #BlackWomenArtists #Casteel #JordanCasteel

Pastel and acrylic painting on canvas of young African-American man painted in pink and turquoise on a dark blue background, with his head haloed with an orange square.

"Jiréh (after Jordan Casteel)." Pastel and acrylic on canvas. #art #artsky #painting #painter #traditionalart #jordancasteel

This is inspired by a full body portrait by Jordan Casteel, but I used a much smaller canvas, and just did the bust.

Included in Jordan Casteel’s first institutional solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum between 2019 and early 2020, “Mom” is a poignant tribute to the artist’s mother, Lauren Young Casteel. Painted in 2013, at the dawn of Jordan’s practice, it demonstrates the rich, sensual painterly language for which she has achieved widespread critical recognition. With intuitive brushwork and deep, warm colors, Casteel captures a moment of peaceful solitude, registering the play of light and shadow across her mom’s face, clothes and hands. It is a rare example of a female portrait in Casteel’s early practice; a testament, perhaps, to the inspiration her mother had on her outlook. As President and CEO of the Woman’s Foundation of Colorado, as well as a noted philanthropist and activist, Lauren Young Casteel became the first Black woman in the state to head a foundation. Saturated with glowing familial warmth, this work is a tender celebration of the woman who helped to shape the artist’s social and artistic values. Indeed, her mother’s devotion to social justice resounds throughout Casteel’s artwork, which focuses on highlighting figures who might otherwise remain unseen. Casteel recalled, “The thing that my mother always instilled in us coming of age was that it’s not necessarily about being the ‘granddaughter of’ or the ‘daughter of’ … it’s about living the values through the work that you’re doing … Long before I became Jordan Casteel the painter, I was Jordan Casteel who understood the value of everyday stories and people and creating voices for people and room for people who might otherwise feel that there’s no room for them.”

“Mom” by Jordan Casteel (American) - Oil on canvas / 2013 - Cantor Arts Center (Stanford, California) #womeninart #art #mother #oilpainting #womanartist #womensart #femaleartist #ArtText #JordanCasteel #Casteel #CantorArtsCenter #fineart #mom #womenartists #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist

#Vogue’s #MetGala #TeyanaTaylor #Janelle Monae, #YaraShahidi #AaronPierre, #AdutAkech #SpikeLee #JulezSmith #ImaanHammam #DapperDan #AnokYai #JerryLorenzo #LaKeithStanfield #AyoEdebiri #JordanCasteel #GraceWalesBonner #Yseult, #LawRoach #NaomiAckie #RashidJohnson #TysonBeckford #NoahLyles

American artist Jordan Casteel's "Pretty in Pink" is a tightly cropped portrait of a beautiful young Black woman riding NY public transit. While the viewer’s proximity to the woman, due to the tight composition, suggests intimacy, the woman’s lack of direct engagement with the viewers maintains her distance. Her face and eyes (with pink makeup) stare downward towards the pink mobile phone in her hand and her loosely curled hair falls over the right side of her face, providing a slight shield. Her layers of pink and lavender clothing — a scarf and closed jacket, in addition to the cream-colored backpack resting on her lap — further close the woman off to visual consumption. Her body is not on display; instead, we are permitted a passing glimpse of her daily life. The painting’s title, Pretty in Pink, refers to the woman’s outfit, including accessories, all coordinating in a soft pink. In the United States, pink is strongly associated with the feminine, so Casteel’s depiction of a Black woman in this hyper-feminine color provides a striking counter to the history of the representation of Black women. With stereotypical representations swinging from masculine to excessively sexualized, Black women have long fought to be viewed as fully individualized people. The respectability politics the past 100+ years sought to correct these racist tropes, however, these efforts often limited women to containers of idealized middle class heteronormative femininity set by Black men. One of the most striking elements of the work is the woman’s long, sharply pointed nails, encircling her phone. While this manicure is now a common style, let's acknowledge the long history of nail art in African American communities as a form of expression stereotypically associated with a "lower class" or status. This marvelous portrait elevates this young, urban Black woman self-stylized in a sweetly feminine and modest manner to be viewed as an individual rather than a class or racial type.

Pretty in Pink by Jordan Casteel (American) - Oil on canvas / 2019 - Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas) #womeninart #art #fineart #oilpainting #pink #portrait #JordanCasteel #artwork #womensart #womenartists #womanartist #portraitofawoman #blackartist #africanamericanartist #ModernArtMuseum

For Black History Month I am posting art by Black artists I love. These are by Jordan Casteel. Her depictions of Black men and boys are haunting at times; beautiful, loving, vulnerable, deserving of love and all good things.
#blackhistorymonth
#blackartists
#jordancasteel