Revelatory in their unflinching expression of human feeling and states of mind, portraits and self-portraits painted by Beverly McIver (born 1962) are materially resplendent, with gestural, energetic brushwork and thickly applied, vibrant colors. Grounded in the artist’s own lived experiences, they disclose the emotional impact of family tensions, strained intimate relationships, racism and sexism, poverty, racial stereotypes, the weight of caretaking, and illness and death. While she draws upon long traditions of portraiture, particularly the creation of self-portraits as a form of introspection and self-realization by women artists such as Frida Kahlo (1907-1964), Alice Neel (1900-1984), and Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), McIver’s paintings are unique in their raw, expressive emotional intensity.

McIver grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the aftermath of the lunch counter sit- ins at the city’s F.W. Woolworth store that brought increased visibility and urgency to the burgeoning Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. She was the youngest of three daughters in a single-parent household living in a government-subsided housing project; her mother supported the family as a domestic worker and devoted substantial time and energy to caring for McIver’s older sister Renee, who McIver describes as intellectually disabled. As a teenager, she was bused to an affluent, predominantly white high school, where she participated in an extracurricular clowning club. She frequently performed in whiteface makeup, a blond wig, and gloves – a form of masquerade that she found both liberating and confusing. “As a clown, I was transformed and in many ways more acceptable to society,” she says, “No one cared that I was black or poor. I was embraced.”1 She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Drawing at North Carolina Central University in 1987, and, recruited to Pennsylvania State University as an outstanding NCCU student, completed her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing at Penn State in 1992. The racism and sexism she encountered as a graduate student made this a traumatic experience; it was the mentorship of the artist Faith Ringgold, who invited McIver to serve as her assistant during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, that restored her sense of artistic self-worth. She was later honored by Penn State with the art department’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2003) and the university’s Alumni Fellow Award (2010). She was also awarded an honorary doctorate by NCCU. McIver taught at Arizona State University (1996-2007) and North Carolina Central University (2007-2014) and is currently Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts at Duke University.2

Curator Kim Curry-Evans (now Kim Boganey), who first met McIver in Arizona, wrote in 2011, “Painting became a vehicle for constructing a painfully honest visual journal about confronting past truths and shaping her future.”3 In the 1990s, McIver began painting self-portraits in which she appears as a clown, in whiteface. These recall her earlier clowning performances and her reckoning during that time with her Blackness. They evoke, too, the feelings triggered by the shocked response of a small white child to the revelation of McIver’s dark skin during one of her performances in whiteface while she was a student at NCCU. Though her skin color and hair are concealed, her dynamic, color-saturated impasto brushwork reinforces the emotional weight of these close-cropped self-portraits. She also began painting portraits of her older sister Renee in the early 1990s that address the joys and the encumbrances of familial bonds and the challenges of long-term caregiving. As she explored her identity and lived experience as a Black woman, McIver also began painting numerous representations of herself in black face paint, including the series Loving in Black and White. Painted between 1997 and 2000, these staged scenes of sensuality and intimacy reveal a Black woman and a white man engaging in mundane activities such as dancing, lovemaking, and sharing food – the racially fraught watermelon appears in several of these paintings. In this series, portraying herself in blackface with a white, male partner, McIver explored interracial relationships, historical taboos, and stereotypes of Black women that burden these relationships, and her own sense of estrangement and erasure while partnered with a white man. The series also calls to mind the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which determined that laws forbidding interracial marriage were unconstitutional and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Blackface is inevitably associated with minstrelsy, racist stereotypes of Blackness, and the interrogation of these stereotypes by artists such as Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Michael Ray Charles (b. 1967), and Kara Walker (b. 1969). Writes art historian Richard J. Powell, “Recognizing in blackface a visual and conceptual device that, via an artist’s ironic deployment, criticizes systemic racism through a sarcastic context or an absurdist rendering, McIver and her fellow visual satirists bravely broached this imagery for the remainder of the 1990s and well into the twenty-first century.”4 For McIver, this critique took the form of works in which she appears, in blackface, as the protagonist in staged narratives drawn from her mother’s life as a domestic worker, paintings that also call out stereotypes of Black women’s labor. Using costumes and props, she posed as a “mammy” figure caring for white children in paintings such as Molly and Her Mammy (1999) in which a small white girl looks on as the central figure cradles a white doll, and re-enacted scenarios of domestic chores, as in 0Washing Dishes (2002). After her mother’s death in 2004, McIver became her sister Renee’s caretaker, and Renee went to live with her in Arizona.5 Her self-portraits from this time convey her grief at the loss of her mother and her conflicted emotions regarding her new role as her sister’s guardian and caregiver.

In evocative self-portraits from the 2000s, such as Finding Peace #1 (2009), McIver portrayed herself unmasked, revealing her own features and her own emotions – her “authentic self.” Reflecting on her emotionally raw Depression paintings (2010), she recognizes that these paintings may be uncomfortable for viewers “because they’ve been there themselves.” McIver says, “I believe that I have sometimes upset people when I have shown my authentic self. I must have courage when portraying my authentic self, whether people can appreciate it or not.”6 A decade after she completed this series, McIver said, “The Depression paintings are just as relevant right now during covid-19. I think people who suffer from depression, their head becomes so big and heavy that they can’t get it off the table. I think it is exceedingly difficult and incredibly vulnerable to share that with anybody. The saving grace is that when people see the work, they understand they are not the only one who feels that way.”7 Rich in their painterly materiality and psychological complexity, McIver’s paintings convey a range of emotions – from grief and confusion to strength and pride—and resonate with truths that are personal, painful, and liberatory.

Melanie Anne Herzog