Alice Neel: People Come First opened at the de Young Museum on March 12, 2022, following presentations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim Bilbao. The career-spanning retrospective gathered more than 100 works and framed Neel as a major twentieth-century portraitist whose art persisted against the dominance of abstraction. Her paintings of friends, children, pregnant women, activists, neighbors, artists, and strangers emphasized psychological presence, political sympathy, and the dignity of ordinary sitters. The San Francisco presentation extended the reassessment that had made the Met version the largest Neel exhibition in New York in two decades.
The exhibition helped consolidate Neel's late canonization as a central American realist and feminist portrait painter.
