Beverly McIver

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BERRY CAMPBELL TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ARMORY SHOW 2024 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, August 13, 2024–Berry Campbell is pleased to announce its participation in The Armory Show 2024. Located at booth 119 at the Javits Center, Berry Campbell Gallery will present a modern take on Women Choose Women (1973), the first large-scale museum exhibition devoted solely to women artists and curated by a committee of women artists at the New York Cultural Center, for The Armory Show 2024.

NC painter Beverly McIver wants to make art that makes a difference

By Vivienne Serret

When you walk into Beverly McIver’s art studio in Chapel Hill, the smell of oil paint fills the room and the eyes of her portraits follow your every move.

Her studio is a sacred space. Sometimes she finds herself painting till the early-morning hours. Other times she enters when her emotions overwhelm her and she needs to unwind. On a corner lies a bed; behind it, paintings inspired by McIver’s own struggles. In one self portrait her hair wraps around her eyes, her hands covering her face.

On her palette, you may find a cherry pit in paint, what’s left of a favorite snack to fuel on when she’s focused on her work.

To McIver, a 61-year-old Greensboro native and art professor at Duke University, art is a way to reach out and educate younger generations on the political state of the world. Her work has been featured in over 40 exhibitions and is in over 10 collections, including the N.C. Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“All the rights that my generation and my mother’s generation fought for are slowly being taken away from women by men,” McIver said.

Beverly McIver, Black Beauty (2024). Photo courtesy of People For The American Way

A group of artists including Shepard Fairey and Carrie Mae Weems has been enlisted by the advocacy organization People For The American Way (PFAW) to create art encouraging U.S. citizens to vote against former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

“People For The American Way is giving talented artists a voice to express their political beliefs because there are not enough outlets to do so,” Fairey said in a phone interview. “Political commentary is frowned upon because art is portrayed as an escapist luxury for rich people who don’t want to think about injustice. It doesn’t need to be that way.”

The art created for the Artist For Democracy 2024 campaign will be released to the public through prints, merchandise, radio and digital ads, celebrity videos, and bus wraps. PFAW has launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for billboards in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona with the hope of expansion to North Carolina and Georgia. And the group seeks to spur texting and boots-on-the-ground efforts.

Beverley McIver, Truly Grateful, 2011, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art, Gift in memory of Janet Martin Lampkin, former member of the executive committee of the Friends of African and African American Art

BEVERLY MCIVER (b. 1962)

A notable presence in American contemporary art, Beverly McIver has charted new directions as a Black female artist. With breathtaking honesty and virtuoso painting, her works tackle difficult themes about the human condition such as depression, racism, poverty, disability, and death. A recent article in Forbes compared her works both to “Frida Kahlo’s heart wrenching self-portraits,” and the “publicly exposed raw autobiography with the likes of Sylvia Plath poetry.” She has received numerous awards and honors and has been the subject of eleven museum exhibitions.

Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, McIver grew up in a single-parent household. Her mother worked tirelessly to make ends meet to support McIver and two sisters, one of which, Renee, has developmental disabilities. Despite these challenges, McIver pursued her artistic inquiry through her education, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from North Carolina Central University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University. Her artistic journey serves as a testament to her perseverance and the complexities that shape her identity such as stereotyping, self-acceptance, family, otherness, illness, death and, ultimately, freedom to express one’s individuality.

See more works by Beverley McIver: https://www.berrycampbell.com/artist/Beverly_McIver/works/

Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery, Pima Community College

January 29 - March 8, 2024
Reception: February 15, 5-7 p.m.

“Portraits” is a captivating gallery exhibit showcasing paintings, photographs, drawings and prints by renowned artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Beverly McIver, Alejandro Macias, Papay Solomon, Gerard Beringer, Vincent Desiderio, Craig Cully and more. The diverse collection explores themes of identity, culture and the human condition. Bernal’s photographs capture the familial ties of Chicano life, while McIver examines issues of race and gender. Macias combines the Latino culture and identity through his use of self-portraits with Mexican and Western influences, Solomon’s hyperrealist portraits celebrate the African diaspora, and Cully’s realist paintings delve into the complexities of identity. “Portraits” invites viewers to experience the power of portraiture in connecting and inspiring. 

Beverly McIver, Norman Lear, 2022, oil on canvas, 30x30 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Beverly McIver, an artist and professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University, remembers watching Lear’s shows every week as a child. Growing up in a housing project in Greensboro, N.C., she identified with J.J. Evans, the teenage aspiring artist who grows up in Chicago public housing, portrayed by Jimmie Walker on “Good Times.”

“These shows gave me hope that I could rise out of the project, not continue the cycle of poverty, and that I could be an artist,” she said.