The Human Situation
10 April - 21 June 2025
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street

Featuring works on loan from the Whitney Museum and more, 'The Human Situation' at Lévy Gorvy Dayan highlights three women artists who worked and played together in the 1960s-70s New York: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh. Staged across multiple floors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan's landmarked Beaux-Arts townhouse, the exhibition will feature more than 45 paintings.

Amid the vibrant New York City cultural scene of the 1960s and 1970s (and into the early-1980s), the three artists portrayed mutual sitters; exhibited together; and participated in public discussions. While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during this time, they collectively experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...” 

Wrote the art historian Lucy Lippard in the 1973 catalogue for the exhibition Women Choose Women, which counted the three artists among its roster: “A large-scale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: ... because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models." As a testament to the enduring resonance of this sentiment (and the overall themes relevant to Marcus, Neel, and Sleigh), six contemporary artists will each exhibit a painting for the exhibition: Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret. — Read more in the press release linked here.

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition, with the credit lines as indicated in the file titles.