The Inner Life of Danielle McKinney

When I first saw the painter Danielle McKinney’s work, at an exhibition last year at the Night Gallery in Los Angeles, I got as close as I could without triggering the alarm. Her portraits of lonely black women at home, beautiful and mysterious, have a cinematic quality; McKinney uses a keen female gaze—red lipstick, curling cigarette smoke, pink nail polish—while thinking, smoking, reading or They were captured in the moment lying naked on the carpet. “I wanted to portray the feeling of: Who am I when I get home and there’s no one around? Who am I without this exterior? The interior space is perfect for that,” McKinney said. In the Western art tradition, black women tend to be at work, in the background, or at the edge of the frame—almost never centered and resting. “You don’t see them lying on the couch,” she added.

Headquartered in McKinney, Jersey City, is , only started painting full-time during the COVID lockdown, but she has a prominent space at the Night Gallery, where co-representing her at Marianne Boesky Gallery , she will have a major solo exhibition in New York this October. Her paintings have been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Miami Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Beyonce also owns one. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, wrote: “Each solo figure exudes a strong sense of self, and the intimate spaces they not only inhabit but conduct make the most of it. They are stronger.” I via email. “Her focus sheds light on assumptions about what black women get when they take a break, like it maintains a level of protective distance from the audience. Ultimately, Danielle’s bringing these scenes to life is an act of transformation.”

Fujin Fiction
“Each individual character exudes a strong sense of self,” says Thelma Golden of McKinney Works. Above:
Tell me more

, 271.

When I first The second time I saw McKinney’s painting, in February of this year, it was in her studio, and the walls were covered with canvases in various stages of completion. They are moody and come in shades of browns, oranges, blues and greens, and are dominated by languid female figures. McKinney often paints based on scenes she sees in photos and movies, and listens to soul music and old R&B as she works. She always starts with an all-black canvas, then lifts her figures from the background, then their room. On a lavender table is a bound vintage magazine
Better Homes & Gardens

McKinney ordered from eBay, she used, and from

of other magazines sand’02s , as a reference to her “minimal but pop” home spaces. Their image reminded her of her grandmother’s friend’s living room, with its plastic-covered printed sofa. Above the table, McKinney posted a sepia photo of her father, who died when she was a year old. “As I stood there and looked around, he kept me straight, ‘Is this okay?'” she said.

We talked again in the summer when she was in the gallery in New York, I was in London and McKinney was done in Spain Just visited there with her artist husband Robert Rost and one-year-old daughter Charlotte after the residency. We share a common connection: we both grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. She was raised on the outskirts of the city as an only child by her mother Barbara, Aunt Francis and grandmother Margaret. McKinney remembers playing with friends under magnolia trees, going to “countryside” family gatherings, spending a few days with his grandfather on the Lowndes County dairy farm, and sitting on the porch with his grandmother’s friends knitting and playing gospel music. “I spend a lot of time with older adults. It’s a sensitive time for me, but it’s also a really good time,” McKinney said. “My grandmother would put me in a room and give me all these magazines and I would cut out the numbers and build a house in a shoebox. I would be there for hours, I mean a few When I was little, I would just be in my own world. That was the most comfortable and soothing feeling.” When she was done, she gave the home to her family.

McKinney was drawn to the act of creating the world with his own hands. “I was just restless, but art was my safe place,” she recalls. Grandma took her to painting classes and mom bought her a Nikon when she was a kid . McKinney began photographing nature for her friends and studied photography at the Atlanta Art Institute before heading to Parsons School of Design in New York. Moving north is not easy. She was depressed for a year and felt out of place. But in the end, “Parsons became my family,” she said. There, she worked on a project on intimacy, taking photos of people on the subway’s “inner moments” and making a video of how strangers react when she touches them. After graduation, McKinney stayed on to work in Parsons’ education department and took pictures in his free time. She submitted an open call for photography but never received a response. Before the pandemic started, she felt trapped.

Peace Chapter

McKinney

Dreamcatcher

, 271, at the Marianne Boesky Gallery this October ) appeared in her solo exhibition.

Photo: Pierre Lejos

But she has been drawing for years and interned at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the summer of , she discovered the portrait of Barkley Hendrix of it. (McKinney was also fascinated by the work of Jacob Lawrence, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Henri Matisse.) I would have a relationship with a man and have these feelings, and I would paint them,” McKinney said of her early canvases “When COVID hit, I started working really hard because I couldn’t go out and take pictures on the street. So this is my release. She set up an easel in her spare bedroom, and after taking a virtual critique class, began sharing her paintings on Instagram. She wrote to dozens of galleries, including Night Gallery, which proposed that the following year

Spring for her to hold an exhibition . “I just sobbed,” McKinney said. “I always wanted to represent me Go to the opening of the gallery instead of seeing black art. After seeing her work, the curators at the New York Biweekly Institute also proposed a solo exhibition in April 89 – McKinney’s first At the time, she was overwhelmed by the reaction to the opening, with a large crowd waiting outside. A few months later, Beyoncé and Jay-Z purchased her painting of a woman in a flowing orange shirt. Glowing woman with a necklace of crosses on her head. “They support young black artists, so I feel honored,” McKinney said.