Alice Neel's long overdue retrospective, People Come First, is currently drawing hordes of visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s no surprise, considering she based her entire life and career around the intimates and strangers that surrounded her. Every class, race, and gender came under her razor-sharp gaze.  And no human being encountering her subjects comes away unscathed. 

Using different media, Hayes sheds light on the human condition as it relates to working-class African Americans, as well as larger communities of men and women. Raised in the South as part of a family that watched the 6-o’clock news, read Ebony and Jet, as well as the local newspapers, Hayes developed a strong interest in picture-making—the basic ideas of looking, recording, and interpreting—and portraiture early on.

While the CSFA cultivated its own, unique school of abstract art, it also exposed its students to New York abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt through summer sessions from 1947 to 1949. For students like Hultberg, Rothko's guest lectures about the New York art scene were inspiring enough to convince them to continue their studies on the East Coast. Briggs, Calcagno, and Schueler followed suit after 1950, a migration catalyzed by Still's decision to move to New York and the subsequent firing of MacAgy.

The Anita Shapolsky Gallery is pleased to present a cross-cultural and trans-historical exploration of the body in art. “Super Bodies” moves beyond the typical focus on abstract expressionist paintings to exhibit art from a potpourri of artists, periods, countries, and media. Antiques from Japan, China, Burma, and Greece from Anita Shapolsky’s own collection are scattered throughout the exhibition to complement the modern and contemporary works, all exemplifying the ever-present drive to represent the body in both the abstract and the figurative.

But the primary focus of the show is a far-reaching exploration of how such personal portraiture has been transformed over the decades.  It comprises not only choice works from Academy members, but entries from places as far-flung as Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and China.  Perhaps the biggest and most welcome surprise is the extent of entries from women—62 such artists represented from 30 different countries in all.