‘With Access Comes Responsibility’: Watch Painter Jordan Casteel Reflect on How Her Rapid Rise to Market Stardom Affects Her Work

The millennial art star Jordan
Casteel is having her first New York solo museum show at the
tender age of 31. Opening this week at the New Museum, the show will
include some 40 paintings, many from her series “Harlem Nights,”
which depict African American men in the same Harlem community
where Casteel lives.

“There are very few spaces where
black men are being represented outside of criminality and
entertainment,” Casteel says in an exclusive interview with Art21. And so she
paints the men she sees as they go about their daily lives: walking
their dogs, buying groceries, sitting on the steps outside an
apartment building. Her large-scale portraits are based on
photographs, and Casteel notes that while it only takes a second to
snap the picture, when it comes to painting their likenesses, “I
sit in here literally for hours alone, in my own head,” she says,
“re-engaging with what I felt from someone in an
instant.” 

In the video, filmed in 2017, when Casteel’s career was just
taking flight, she already has a sense of the enormity of what
she’s achieved in such a short time. “I have somehow found a way to weasel myself
into a one-percent opportunity within the art market that has
proven, on so many levels, that room for me is few and far between,
as a young African American woman in a space that is primarily run
by older white men.” 

Now, three years later, Casteel’s subjects have expanded to
include her own students at Rutgers, where she is an assistant
professor, but her commitment to representing individuals in her
community remains in tact. “With
access comes responsibility. With visibility comes responsibility,”
she says.

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration
between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking
artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art
in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all
episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play
and learn about the organization’s educational programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘With Access Comes Responsibility’: Watch Painter
Jordan Casteel Reflect on How Her Rapid Rise to Market Stardom
Affects Her Work appeared first on artnet News.