The new work will certainly feature African-American men but also other subjects, such as women and still lifes.

These busy days, Casteel splits her time between teaching at Rutgers–Newark and creating paintings in her midtown Manhattan studio for a solo exhibition, Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, opening in January at the Denver Art Museum. “My original intent was to share that view with the world, creating images that reflected what I knew best about these men: a very sensitive, vulnerable aspect to them.” “The vulnerability of my family is something that people didn’t get to see and experience the way I did,” says Casteel, the daughter of a social activist mother and granddaughter of the civil rights leader Whitney Moore Young Jr. And she saw that their own perceptions of themselves were influenced by how the world saw them. Growing up in Denver, Colorado, she saw the impact of this dismissive gaze on her father and two brothers (she is the twin of the younger one). It’s a view that these men often internalize, and Casteel knows it all too well. That somebody is likely a man who, like novelist Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, has known a lifetime of being disregarded and misunderstood. I can move things around and build a composition that best articulates the story of who somebody is.” “I don’t have to be stuck with what’s in that photograph. “What is fun about painting is that I can be a magician,” says Casteel, who moved to New York City after graduating from the Yale School of Art in 2014. This interplay reflects her concern, she says, with our diminishing sense of community and our inability to communicate with one another in this age of the smartphone. Casteel relies on these unspoken conversations for the painting to work. Like the Crockett brothers, the cousins appear unguarded, each in his own way engaging the person looking at them-Casteel, the viewer-with curiosity. In Hamilton Cousins, another large oil painting created in 2015, two young men sit next to each other on a love seat on a hardwood floor. One sibling is resting a saxophone on the white-carpeted floor. In Crockett Brothers, one of Casteel’s 2015 oil paintings, two young African-American men sit side by side in identical winged-back chairs covered in a bright floral pattern. WATCH A VIDEO OF JORDAN CASTEEL DISCUSSING ART Our ease with ourselves is reflected in that which is around us, especially that which we choose to be around.”

“And so is the environment that we put ourselves in. “The backgrounds in the paintings are important,” says Casteel. To start the process, Casteel takes photographs of her subjects, selecting representative shots from which to create a composite for the environment in which her subjects will appear. Noting the popularity of this art movement, the New York Times declared that “painters like Jordan Casteel … have found success with a form that was long considered unfashionable.”

The first couple, connoisseurs of work by African-American artists, had selected the painters Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald to create their likenesses. They are receiving lots of attention, exemplified by the stir that accompanied the unveiling of the official White House portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Casteel, an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University–Newark since 2016, is part of a new generation of African-American painters who are looking at race in response to the historical absence of nonwhites in Western painting.

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