The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Juanita McNeely opening on Saturday April 7, 2018. Included is Moving Through, a major 35-foot long, 9-panel work painted in 1975.
Juanita McNeely’s savage figurative expressionism is central to the development of feminist art in the 1960s and 1970s. (In many ways McNeely is the “Feminist Francis Bacon,” oxymoron though that might be.) Still, otherwise inclusive surveys of feminist art such as Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution at LA MOCA and P.S.1 in 2006 did not include her paintings (as they omitted work by artists like Judith Bernstein, Anita Steckel, Eunice Golden and Betty Tompkins). McNeely was a part of the Fight Censorship group organized after the closure of an exhibition of paintings by Anita Steckel. This group included Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, Joan Semmel and Eunice Golden, among others, and has become a central focus of revisionist feminist histories. The artist appeared with many of the Fight Censorship group in a groundbreaking article, The Feminist View of Erotica, in New York Magazine in 1974. McNeely’s work was the subject of Indomitable Spirit, a survey of McNeely’s 60-year career curated by Susan Metrican at Brandeis University’s Women’s Study Research Center in 2014.
Juanita McNeely was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1936. She attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University where she studied with Werner Drewes and Southern Illinois University where she studied with Alan Kaprow. McNeely moved to New York in 1967 and showed with the cooperative Prince Street SoHo 20 Galleries in the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as with the Evelyn Amis Gallery in Toronto, Canada. The artist has received grants from the Adolph & Ester Gottlieb Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Ellin P. Speyer prize for painting from the National Academy Museum. The artist was recently profiled along with Judith Bernstein, Betty Tompkins and Carolee Schneemann in The New Times’ T Magazine. Juanita McNeely continues to live and work in New York.