For artist Jordan Casteel and fashion designer Batsheva Hay, it was love at first sight. While their husbands, both photographers, had been close for years, the two women struck up a friendship of their own during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Denver-born, New York-based painter was hunting for her wedding dress. “I knew I didn’t want to wear a white dress. I wanted to wear something fun, playful, and representative of me,” says Casteel. After the artist’s now husband, David Schulze, recommended Hay, known for her flouncy, printed frocks, the designer wound up making Casteel two wedding dresses: one of blue and yellow wax-print fabric and the other of red moiré.
“Batsheva and I are both very interested in color and pattern and the way that our work can activate spaces and bodies. There’s a real playfulness in her clothing that I’m similarly interested in in the context of my work,” says Casteel. Known for portraits and paintings that Hay describes as “earnest, bright, and interesting,” Casteel has a knack for rendering patterns and textures — think heavily impastoed shearling coats or iridescent rubber wellies you can almost hear squeaking. Like Hay, the artist delights in unexpected color combinations, often replacing her sitters’ natural skin tones with shades of red, green, and purple.
Over the years, Casteel’s practice has expanded to encompass city scenes, landscapes, and still lifes, reflecting her move from Harlem to upstate New York in 2021, though no matter the subject, her brilliant mark making remains incredibly consistent. Through November 23, the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea is presenting “Jordan Casteel: Field of view,” a solo exhibition featuring 25 works spanning the last decade of her career. Curated by Lauren Haynes, head curator at Governors Island Arts and vice president for arts and culture at the Trust for Governors Island in New York City, the show includes important loans alongside four monumental portraits from the collection of J. Tomilson Hill, the nonprofit organization’s founder. (Two of these portraits are promised gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.)
While the show’s title, “Field of view” references Casteel’s process of photographing her sitters prior to painting them, it also sets the tone for what is arguably the artist’s most personal show to date. “My mom sent me a text saying, ‘I don’t know about you, but I think this is your best show yet.’ There’s an element of that that I completely agree with,” says Casteel. “This show feels so of me, and the way that I engage with my work on a day-to-day basis. It’s the crux of how I feel when making these paintings and experiencing them when they’re all together. It’s the full embodiment of me in the practice.”