Beverly McIver

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.