Artist Juanita McNeely died last Wednesday, October 18 at the age of 87. Over the course of her 60-year career, McNeely became known for her vibrant, contorting depictions of women’s bodies, often constrained by disease and medical malpractice. She crafted an eerily timely body of work that has become especially resonant in recent years as women’s reproductive rights continue to come under threat in the United States and worldwide, a feat she accomplished beginning with portrayals of her own physicality.
The news of her death was confirmed by James Fuentes Gallery.
Born in 1936, McNeely received a cancer diagnosis in her first year of college at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. She was told she had only three to six months to live; against these odds, however, she beat the disease and went on to earn a Master’s degree from Southern Illinois University before teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago.
McNeely moved to New York in 1967, where she settled in the East Village, carving a path forward in the male-dominated art world and forging friendships with a growing number of feminist artists in the city.
Soon after, however, McNeely realized her cancer had returned. She visited the doctor and learned she was pregnant. The artist was told she was in physical need of an abortion, but the doctors said they were legally forbidden from giving her one. She was forced to seek an illegal abortion. Six years later, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, securing the constitutional right to an abortion. The decision was overturned by a Conservative-led Supreme Court last June.
McNeely depicted her experience of the procedure in her landmark multi-panel work “Is it Real? Yes it is!” (1969), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She painted multiple images of her own body: bound with rope, emaciated after a second fight with cancer, exposed as she spreads her legs into the stirrups, and helpless beneath vultures presenting the specter of death. In one panel, McNeely portrays the faces of three masked doctors from her point of view on the table.
“I was a cartoon, I was not a real person anymore,” the artist said in an interview. “I had become something, but not the real person.”
In McNeely’s other works, bodies contort and move as if constrained by an invisible force. As Hyperallergic noted in a 2020 review, the artist’s work evokes the same experiences people face today while seeking medical treatment in the archaic and chronically under-researched women’s health field that consistently underserves them. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade last spring, the artist’s paintings took on a new life, assuming the same life-or-death urgency they held when she created them before 1973.
McNeely’s extensive oeuvre extends beyond depictions of the human body. She crafted intimate portraits of her loved ones, reflective still lives, and satirical social commentaries, most of which she rendered with her characteristic hint of the grotesque. She continued to paint through the end of her life.
McNeely’s paintings are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions.
