Juanita McNeely “Is It Real? Yes It Is” 1969

“For 90 years of its existence, the Whitney Museum of American Art did not own a single painting that explicitly deals with abortion. But that has changed. The museum recently purchased Juanita McNeely’s “Is it Real? Yes It Is!” (1969), a mural-sized painting that recounts, in a fragmented narrative spanning nine separate panels, her harrowing experience of having an abortion in the early ’60s, when the procedure was illegal. The painting will make its museum debut on Sept. 20, when the Whitney rehangs its permanent collection.

In recent years, a fashion for painting the human figure has preoccupied the art world, with an emphasis on race, gender and other urgent social issues. Yet another pressing topic in America has been curiously absent from art: abortion, which became all the more timely when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

Depictions of abortion are still rare in the art-history canon. Check the walls of museums and flip through the pages of H.W. Janson or other art textbooks, and you are likely to encounter countless images of beatific mothers, dimpled infants and a world in which pregnancies are not terminated.

But the subject of abortion, which historically was shrouded in shame and relegated to the realm of unspeakable secrets, has lately been gaining visibility in the art world.”

– Deborah Solomon
NY Times
September 10, 2022

Read the complete article: After Decades of Silence, Art about Abortion (Cautiously) enters the Establishment

Juanita Mc Neeley’s work can also be seen at the Westbeth Gallery in the Print Paint Show opening October 9, 2022. More info here: PRINT PAINT