Notes on Danielle McKinney's Quiet Storm

Flesh—unadorned. Painting, as a gesture, rather than a material, implies and reproduces the grammatically coherent “flesh” of McKinney’s black women. I found myself entranced mostly by the nude works which forced McKinney to trace the contours of the Black female flesh to its end(s), it’s limit(s), its edge(s).

McKinney’s nudes sober up the color-drunk exhibition /Quiet Storm/; they confront the viewer with an aesthetic stillness. They force the viewer to trace the edges of the body—where do the browns end? where does black end? where does the body begin? where does the flesh end? The architecture of the interior as constructed by McKinney’s staging and framing entraps one within a racialized-gendered intimacy that inspires these questions of the edges, the limits, and the ends of her figures.

Danielle McKinney: Quiet Storm on view @marianneboeskygallery until April 27, 2024

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