Beverly McIver: Retrospective

Turner Carroll Gallery Hosts Touring Museum Exhibition, Beverly McIver: Retrospective

Public Opening: February 10, 2023, 5–7 pm at Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM

On view through March 10, 2023

Turner Carroll is pleased to announce artist, Beverly McIver’s first solo exhibition with our gallery, opening to the public on February 10th. Beverly is known for her deeply vulnerable painting practice, which includes clown makeup self-portraits, and portraits of people significant to her, including her older sister Renée.

On February 11, 2023, at 1 pm, McIver and her retrospective curator Kim Boganey will discuss McIver’s Dear God and Loving in Black and White series, followed by a book signing of McIver’s retrospective monograph at 2 pm, at Turner Carroll’s institutional venue, CONTAINER, located at 1226 Flagman Way in the Baca Railyard. Kim Boganey, will travel to Santa Fe for the exhibition and will give talks at both the February 10 opening at Turner Carroll and also the CONTAINER event on February 11. Kim organized Beverly’s first solo exhibition in the Southwest in 1998 in Arizona, and she curated Beverly’s museum retrospective Beverly McIver: Full Circle, which is currently traveling the country.

While Beverly’s practice is deeply, and, at times for some viewers, uncomfortably personal, the themes she returns to are universal ones: family, self-acceptance, illness, death, identity, empathy, and the acknowledgment of the existence of stereotypes, as a way to push against them. Beverly McIver grew up in the projects of Greensboro NC, where the infamous drug store sit-ins occurred. She had only white dolls to play with. The only time she felt comfortable was when she wore white face makeup in clown class in high school, because that’s where she felt she fit in with the white kids she was bussed across town to be with, in a white high school as part of desegregation. In her college work, Beverly wed the clown motif to blackface, and her iconic, raw, disquieting aesthetic was born. Beverly and Renée were the subjects of a documentary, Raising Renée, by Academy Award-nominated and award-winning filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan. Produced in association with HBO, the film tells the story of Beverly’s promise to her mother to care for her older sister, Renée, who was born with developmental disabilities. Raising Renée can now be seen on Amazon Prime.

Beverly’s work is found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, North Carolina Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, Baltimore Museum of Art, Nelson Fine Arts Center Art Museum at Arizona State University, and Mint Museum, among others. Beverly is the Ebenshade Professor of the Practice in Studio Arts at Duke University, and taught at Arizona State University for 12 years. In 2011, Beverly was listed in Art in America’s “Top Ten in Painting.” Recent honors include a year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome where she was featured in a documentary for Italian television titled Beverly McIver e il colore nero.