Alice Neel spent her later life surrounded by writers, and brought this lyrical sensibility to her paintings. In this tour, poet and editor Rochelle Roberts unveils Neel’s poetic instinct.
Neel captured Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Fearing in paint, and appeared in an avant-garde film with Jack Kerouac. But Neel was also an unpublished poet herself. For this evening, Rochelle Roberts takes us through the gallery, shedding light on the relationship between text and image and how it feeds into Neel’s extraordinary works.
Rochelle Roberts is a writer and editor based in London. Her essays and poetry have been published by Prototype, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Arusha gallery and Maximillian William gallery, amongst others, and in the book Cusp: Feminist Writings on Bodies, Myth & Magic (Ache, 2022). In 2022, her debut poetry pamphlet Your Retreating Shadow was published by Broken Sleep Books. She is also editor at the arts publisher Prestel.
