Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "The Human Situation" Exhibition

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

April 10 – June 21, 2025

Sylvia Sleigh 

The Blue Dress, 1970

Oil on canvas, 66½ × 34½ inches (168.9 × 87.6 cm) 

Collection of Audrey and Joseph Anastasi 

© Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, 

courtesy of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh and Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Alice Neel 

Pregnant Nude, 1967

Oil on canvas, 36½ × 57¼ inches (92.7 × 145.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York, courtesy of AWG Art Advisory

© Estate of Alice Neel, 

courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, marks the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (b. 1928), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sylvia Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...”

In 1973, paintings by the three figurative artists were on view in the unprecedented exhibition Women Choose Women, organized by Women in the Arts and presented at the New York Cultural Center. The three painters would exhibit together again in the following years, notably in Women’s Work: American Art 1974, Philadelphia Civic Center and In Her Own Image, Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both part of Focus on Women in the Visual Arts, 1974)—as well as Sons and Others: Women Artists See Men, Queens Museum (1975). Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh too were early participants in the collaborative installation The Sister Chapel, PS1, New York (1978)—from which Marcia Marcus eventually withdrew due to teaching and other exhibition commitments—with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh unveiling large-scale paintings.

In their works, each artist differentiated herself from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism—capturing Neel’s predecessor Robert Henri’s principle “Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.” Their distinguished images depicted many of the same artistic and critical figures, including David Bourdon, Sari Dienes, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and John Perreault, among others, as well as self-portraits. They also each painted or collaborated with writers and curators such as Lucy Lippard, Cindy Nemser, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Marcia Tucker, and Sleigh’s husband Lawrence Alloway.

While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during the 1960s and 1970s, they experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. This historical environment is described by Lucy Lippard in her exhibition catalogue introduction for Women Choose Women: 

“A largescale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in, museum group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models; because although seventy-five percent of the undergraduate art students are female, only two percent of their teachers are female. And above all—because the New York museums have been particularly discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating.” 

Although the three artists aligned with and participated in feminist causes to varying degrees, the energies of the movement created a focus on women’s art, resulting in exhibitions, galleries such as AIR Gallery and Soho 20 Gallery, grassroots publications, organizations including Women’s Interart Center and Women’s Caucus for Art, and panel discussions, in which they each featured. The portraits by Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh gesture towards this critical art-historical moment, while illuminating for viewers each artist’s distinctive point of view. 

As a testament to their legacies, the exhibition features works by contemporary figurative painters Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret, who carry forward the tradition of rendering lived images of self, family, friends, and the home. Presenting recent and new canvases created on the occasion of the exhibition, the contemporary artists share in the history and atmosphere of community, and expand upon the themes of womanhood, intimate portraiture, the nude, and the still life that underlie The Human Situation. 

LEVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Related Posts:

Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973 @ Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, October 12 - December 2, 2017

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York, February 26 - April 13, 2019

Alice Neel @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 - April 15, 2001

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious @ Ortuzar, New York, February 12 – April 5, 2025

Marcia Marcus @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973"

Marcia Marcus 

Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

October 12 – December 2, 2017

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973. The exhibition constitutes a major re-examination of a portraitist who worked at the intersection of painting, proto-performance art, and identity politics. Marcus’ portraits, self-portraits, and group portraits – of artists, writers, family, friends, and acquaintances – show how portraiture sheds light on the shifting roles we all embody. Several paintings are on loan from museums and private collections. 

The works in this exhibition tell a story about a specific time—the 1960s and 70s.  Portraiture was performative for Marcia Marcus, apparent in the depictions of herself and her subjects in varying roles and guises, wearing bold, fashionable clothing and costumes.  Figures are orchestrated into stylish settings with suggestive patterning and embellishment: Marimekko-style floral design, gold and silver leafing, and collage elements.  The work reveals Marcus’ subversive playfulness as well as her unapologetic examination of female desire, race, and motherhood.

Marcia Marcus was raised in Upper Manhattan. The simplified architectural motifs that recur in her paintings, such as gilded archways, may be traced back to the formative memory of the Cloisters, built during her youth uptown. Marcus studied at the Art Students League with Edwin Dickinson, a teacher she adored and whose influence can be felt in the refinement of Marcus’ draftsmanship and tonal subtlety. At Cooper Union, where she studied in the early 1950s, her peers included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, with whom her work shares aesthetic and formal qualities.

By 1953, Marcia Marcus was collaborating with Allan Kaprow.  She was a founding member of the March Gallery where she had her first solo show in 1957.  Marcus was invited to be part the Delancey Street Museum by Red Grooms, along with collaborators Jay Milder and Bob Thompson. It was there, in February 1960, that she became the first woman artist to stage a “Happening,” and in April 1960, was the subject of a one-person show.

For over twenty-five years, beginning in 1952, Marcia Marcus spent summers living and working in one of the legendary Provincetown dune shacks on Cape Cod. Her close friend Lucas Samaras posed for a full-length portrait in the dunes, wearing only a small bathing suit, which she embellished with gold leafing.  Marcus worked from life — as opposed to photography — even on massive canvases outdoors.

Marcia Marcus’ self-portraits, in various guises, settings, and costumes, address the shifting roles that women can occupy throughout their lives. As an artist working in a Lower East Side loft, and supporting herself with Midtown office jobs, she was intimately familiar with how quickly one’s roles can shift. In this, her conceptual goals were ahead of their time, and can be compared to artists such as Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson. The experience of young motherhood was handled with a particularly inquisitive eye in Art and the Family (1966), in which Marcia Marcus divided the painting in half, inviting her two young daughters to paint their version of the family on one side. The other half is Marcus’ depiction of the family, with an elaborately collaged ground that includes news clippings with thematically relevant texts and images.

Marcia Marcus also addressed race prominently in her work.  She presented ethnic background and skin tone in a nuanced way, using ambiguous grayish tones — relatable to grisaille photography — to depict the flesh of her figures. Even her self-portraits vary in skin tone from painting to painting – suggesting, again, that one’s identity is fluid, rather than fixed.  Marcus’ selection of African-American friends and acquaintances as the subjects of numerous portraits is notable, considering the tense social climate and racial divisions of the late 1960s.  Renoir (1968) shows a young African-American friend of the family in a patterned midriff top and matching orange pants.  It becomes a statement about the history of heroic portraiture and who is represented.

Beginning in the 1960s, museums and universities across the country were actively acquiring Marcus’ work.  By the 1980s, Marcus’ visibility in the art world had ebbed, as she devoted more time to visiting professorships. This exhibition — the first major survey of her work in over thirty years — highlights her formal innovations and conceptual relevance today, re-introducing the work to a contemporary audience.

MARCIA MARCUS was born in New York City on January 11, 1928. She received her BA from New York University in 1947, and studied at the Cooper Union from 1950-52, and at the Art Students League in 1954. Marcus was awarded a Walter Gutman Fund award for travel to Florence in 1961 and a Fulbright Grant in 1962 to Paris. Her work was exhibited in New York by Alan Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, ACA Gallery, and Terry Dintenfass Gallery in the 1960s and 70s. She was the subject of a retrospective in 1984 organized by the Canton Art Institute, Canton, OH. Marcia Marcus also had a distinguished career as a professor, with teaching positions and visiting professorships at over 20 institutions, including the Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Iowa, Vassar College, and the University of California, Davis. Her paintings are currently in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH; and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, among many others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Jessica Bell Brown.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

4 Great Jones Street, #4, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com