Juanita McNeely, Peter + Dolores Mirrors (1970s), oil on canvas, 72 × 50 × 2″ is part of her exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum. (The artist and James Fuentes Gallery, © Juanita McNeely and James Fuentes Gallery)
They say you can’t go home again. Juanita McNeely has done it — better late than never! Born in Ferguson in 1936 and educated in St. Louis, in 1967 Juanita McNeely left for New York, where she would spend 50 productive years as a painter and ceramicist while amassing an extraordinary oeuvre dedicated largely to female figuration from a decidedly feminist point of view.
Eschewing the dominant postwar art movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art or minimalism, McNeely cultivated an original practice driven by her lived, bodily experience. She survived a cancer scare in her first year of art school at Washington University and never looked back. The experience thickened her skin and pushed her toward edgier, abject subject matter: the horror of the maimed, diseased or decaying human body and its ickier functions.
McNeely continued to struggle with medical issues and misogyny In New York, but managed to channel it into her work. She participated in several radical feminist collectives like Fight Censorship, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Redstockings, who proactively moved the stubborn institutional needle to be more inclusive of women artists. And yet, half a century later, there remains much work to be done.
In an ironic twist of art justice, the Whitney Museum of American Art, who McNeely and WAR bitterly called out in 1969 for including only eight women of 143 artists in their annual contemporary survey exhibition (now the Whitney Biennial), would eventually acquire the artist’s harrowing nine-panel painting, Is It Real? Yes, It Is! in 2022, a year before her death. This wrenching work from 1969 depicts her survival experience of an illegal abortion while undergoing treatment for a recurrence of her cancer. Finally — in a precarious post-Roe v. Wade moment — the Whitney has caught up with artist’s prescient vision.
So now has McNeely’s hometown. “Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time,” a triennial three-month citywide art exhibition, is the impetus for celebrating Juanita McNeely’s visceral body of work at two concurrent exhibitions opening Sept. 10 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Saint Louis Art Museum. Although posthumous, it marks the artist’s first solo exhibitions in St. Louis.
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis centers their show on an even larger monumental work than at the Whitney. Triskaidekaptych (1986) is an intense, 13-panel, side-by-side painting produced in the painful years following a spinal cord injury that left her wheelchair bound. Rendered in her mature style of distorted human and animal forms, peculiar framing devices and weird angles, the palette spans chilly blues and blacks to a spectrum of warm flesh tones from tongue to toe. The artist reveled in the tension of balancing beauty with trauma.
Meanwhile, Saint Louis Art Museum, where the artist spent many hours of her youth studying the works of Max Beckmann, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse, presents a fuller retrospective view, some 60 years of McNeely’s work across media including drawings, ceramics and paintings. This homecoming, long overdue, is most welcome for an artist of such uncompromising, deeply personal vision. McNeely’s work remains charged with fearless biological and political energy with plenty more to say to our time.
“Juanita McNeely” runs Sept. 9, 2026, to Feb. 28, 2027, at the Saint Louis Art Museum, www.slam.org/exhibitions and Sept. 10, 2026 to Feb. 7, 2027 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Counterpublic, camstl.org/.
