Juanita McNeely: Holding Back spans works from the 1980s through her late career, unified by deep cobalts and ultramarines that animate figures — human and animal, often simultaneously — in radically destabilized pictorial space. Ladders, windowpanes, netting, mirrors, and shadows fracture compositions into multiple planes that multiply and collapse at once. The earliest work, Pre-Abortion Law Remembrance (1985), connects to her pathbreaking Whitney-held nine-panel painting, reckoning with the violence of her near-fatal fight for a life-saving procedure. Across all, McNeely transforms the ugly and terrible into something radiant.
