Juanita McNeely. Paintings

About

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.