Jordan Casteel

Casteel is best known for painting colossal portraits of her family, friends, neighbors, and of strangers “who might not otherwise be portrayed on museum walls.”

Jordan Casteel was born in 1989 in Denver, Colorado. As a kid, "she enjoyed making objects from materials she found around her house and making small sketches of her high school classmates.”

She has a twin brother and an older brother. Her mother, Lauren Young Casteel, is a social justice activist. Her grandmother, Margarent Buckner Young, was a teacher and an author of children’s books. Her grandfather was Whitney Young, a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Jordan Casteel is young and active online! You can follow her on Instagram @jordanmcasteel

Jordan Casteel is an American figurative painter.

Casteel’s artwork was influenced by previous Masters of the Month:

“Figurative Art” describes any artwork that represents the real world especially if it includes a human figure.

"Figure" is the artsy way to say "body."

Romare Beardon, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, and Faith Ringgold.

After graduating from Yale, Casteel moved to New York. She taught special ed and painted in her spare time.

Casteel studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Italy, and she earned her first degree from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

Jordan Casteel

She has an auto-immune disorder, lupus, that was especially difficult to manage when she was in school.

Her first solo show featured large paintings of black men sitting in their homes.

She persevered to earn a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Yale where she was included in the now historic, 13 Artists exhibition.

Her second show, Brothers, contained 8 dual-portraits also of black men.

Jordan Casteel lives in Harlem with her husband, photographer David Schulze.

“I think that that is bigger than anything else I’ve done in my life," Casteel said, "Putting people, who have maybe spent their lives feeling invisible in certain ways, front and center and honored in the way that they ultimately deserve to be honored.”

Casteel described her perspective as “full of empathy and love. I see their humanity and, in turn, I want the audience to engage with them as fathers, sons, brothers, cousins – as individuals with their own unique stories to share.”

Her artwork can be seen in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art right here in Los Angeles.

Her first major museum exhibition was at the Denver Art Museum. She shared 30 portraits that she’d painted of her neighbors in Harlem. She received the MacArther “Genius Grant” in 2021.