Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Jackie Curtis as a Boy
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Far from the cross-dressing trash-glam queen Neel painted two years earlier in Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd, also in this exhibition, Curtis here averts the viewer’s gaze and wears no makeup, just jeans, a blue-and-red undershirt, and a loose white baseball jersey. Unassuming, if a bit remote, the performer appears conspicuously "All-American," a decidedly ironic projection given Curtis’s unapologetically subversive predisposition. The boyish portrait reveals the other side of the performer’s expansive play with gender, as, depending on mood and the day, Curtis would don men’s drag rather than women’s. The addition of "as a boy" to the title underscores this ongoing performance of gender.
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