The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Alice Neel: People Come First at The Met Fifth Avenue. The museum described it as the first New York museum retrospective of Neel in twenty years and an ambitious survey of roughly one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Organized with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibition framed Neel as one of the twentieth century's most radical painters, emphasizing her portraits of activists, Spanish Harlem neighbors, queer artists and performers, mothers, nudes, and members of New York's global diaspora. Opening after a year of pandemic closure and social upheaval, the retrospective foregrounded Neel's political humanism and her belief that portraiture could assert the dignity of ordinary people.
The retrospective reinforced Neel's central place in narratives of social realism, feminism, and modern portraiture.
