Jordan Casteel valuation
New York painter of large, close-up portraits of the people of Harlem and the subway, who meet the viewer's eye.
Jordan Casteel was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1989, graduated from Agnes Scott College in Georgia in 2011 and took her MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale in 2014.
What a work by Jordan Casteel is worth
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Bio
Jordan Casteel was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1989, graduated from Agnes Scott College in Georgia in 2011 and took her MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale in 2014. Her first solo exhibition in New York, Visible Man, at Sargent's Daughters that year, showed large paintings of Black men, mostly nude, seated in their own homes. A residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015 and 2016 turned her to the street: portraits of neighbours, vendors and strangers in Harlem, painted from her own photographs in the places she met them, in strong, unexpected colour and at larger than life size. Since 2015 she has also painted the Subway series, fellow passengers seen at close range, often only hands and laps. She has named Alice Neel and Bob Thompson among her models. The Denver Art Museum gave her first major museum exhibition, Returning the Gaze, in 2019, and the New Museum in New York held Within Reach in 2020. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021 and teaches painting at Rutgers University-Newark.
Her large portraits are much sought after, and the date, the sitter's name, which usually gives the title, and the route from the studio through Sargent's Daughters, Casey Kaplan or Thaddaeus Ropac are what a buyer checks. The paintings are oil on canvas, often very large, and need professional packing and careful hanging.
Denver, Yale and Harlem
Nights in Harlem, her third solo exhibition, opened at Casey Kaplan in New York in 2017. The High Line in New York showed her painting The Baayfalls from 2019.
Thaddaeus Ropac presented her work in London in 2025.
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