SFMOMA, Part 18: Floor 2, section 1900 to Now.
On Floor 2, in the 1900 to Now galleries, there is a painting the size of a wall, and the wall is a living room, and the living room is on fire with color.
Serwaa and Amoakohene is 90 by 78 inches — seven and a half feet tall, six and a half wide, bigger than the people it depicts — and it shows a young man and his mother sitting on a couch. That is the composition. A couch, two people, a room. But the execution is what stops you: the young man, Amoakohene, sits forward, his arms resting on his knees or on his mother, his gaze direct and calm. His mother, Serwaa, sits beside him, close enough that their shoulders touch, her hand near his arm — the exact posture of a mother who is proud and is not going to make a speech about it. Around them, the room explodes: patterned textiles, saturated color, walls and fabrics rendered in the amber and indigo and green that have become Jordan Casteel's signature. Nothing in the painting is a single shade. The skin is built from purples and browns and golds. The couch is a landscape. The whole thing hums.
You half expect them to start talking. That is the strangest thing about standing in front of it — the painting is completely still, and it feels like it is about to move.
Jordan Casteel painted Serwaa and Amoakohene in 2019, in oil on canvas, and it measures 90 × 78 inches — 228.6 × 198.1 cm. SFMOMA acquired it as a gift of the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. It is currently on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection. The sitters are Serwaa, and her son Amoakohene, one of Casteel's students at Rutgers University-Newark, painted in 2019 and shown in her first New York solo museum exhibition, Within Reach, at the New Museum in 2020.
The easy reading is that this is a celebration — a warm, beautiful portrait of Black family life, a corrective to centuries of art history in which Black people were absent or marginal. But the subject is sharper than that. Casteel is not correcting the record. She is building a new one, at a scale the old one cannot ignore. The size is the argument. For most of the history of Western painting, Black life was painted small — in the corners of other people's paintings, in the backgrounds, in the margins. Casteel paints it seven and a half feet tall. The scale is not decoration. It is a claim: this life is monumental. The museum wall agrees, or it has to.
2019: Within reach
The painting belongs to a specific series: the portraits Casteel made of her students at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches. Amoakohene was her student. Serwaa is his mother. Casteel painted them together, in their space, in the patterned interior that is the painting's other subject.
The series became Within Reach, her first solo museum exhibition in New York, at the New Museum in 2020 — nearly forty paintings spanning her career, including the early Visible Man series and the Nights in Harlem paintings, but centered on the new student portraits. The title is doing double work. Within reach: the students are close to her, literally — she knows them, she sees them every week. And within reach: the thing she is painting — dignity, monumentality, the museum wall — is finally, actually, within reach.
The student portraits are the most formally adventurous work she had made to that point. The brushwork got looser, more fluid. The color got stranger — the skin tones built from colors that are not skin colors, the backgrounds dissolving into pattern and light. In Serwaa and Amoakohene, the right side of the composition goes almost abstract: the textiles and the wall and the light merge into bands of color that have stopped describing objects and started describing warmth. It is the painting equivalent of the moment in a conversation when you stop hearing the words and just feel the room.
1989–2014: Denver to Yale
Jordan Casteel was born in 1989 in Denver, Colorado. She started as a teacher — working in Colorado, painting in the evenings — and then realized, the way people do, that the evenings were the real life and the days were the interruption. She went to Yale for her MFA, graduating in 2014, and the early work was already asking the question that would define the career: who gets to be looked at, and how?
The first answer was Visible Man (2013–14), a direct inversion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: a series of large nude portraits of Black men, painted while she was still a student. The nudes were a provocation and a thesis — the Black male body, so policed and feared in American life, rendered with tenderness and at scale. Then came the move to New York, a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Nights in Harlem (2017): portraits of the men in her neighborhood — the shop owners, the guys on the corner — painted with the same monumental attention. The throughline was consistent: take the people the culture looks past, and paint them so large and so carefully that looking past becomes impossible.
2017–2020: The gaze, reversed and returned
Casteel's great subject is the gaze — who looks, who is looked at, and what happens when the looked-at looks back. Almost all of her sitters meet the viewer's eye directly. This is not an accident. It is the painting's engine.
The history she is working against is specific: the history of Black figures in Western art as objects — the servants in the corner of the portrait, the exoticized bodies, the subjects of someone else's vision. Casteel's sitters are subjects. They look back. And the looking-back is not confrontational — it is not a challenge — it is something rarer: it is an invitation issued on equal terms. Amoakohene's gaze in Serwaa and Amoakohene is calm, direct, unguarded. He is not performing for you. He is allowing you to be there.
There is a lineage here, and Casteel knows it. Alice Neel — whose Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian hangs in this same gallery, forty years earlier — painted her sitters with the same directness, the same refusal to flatter. But Neel's gaze was diagnostic: she looked at people to find the truth under the performance. Casteel's gaze is collaborative: she looks at people to confirm what they already know about themselves. The Neel portrait says, I see you. The Casteel portrait says, I see you seeing me, and we are good.
The color is the other half of the argument. Casteel does not paint Black skin the way the tradition taught — as shadow, as darkness, as the absence of light. She paints it as light itself: amber, lavender, indigo, gold, green, colors that have no business being skin colors and are exactly right. The technique is a refusal of the old colorism — the idea, baked into centuries of painting, that dark skin is hard to paint, that it absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Casteel's skin radiates. The old masters would not have known what to do with these colors. That is the point.
And the scale completes it. The 90-by-78-inch canvas is not just big — it is confrontationally big, the size reserved in the old tradition for history painting, for generals and myths. Casteel gives that scale to a student and his mother on a couch. The art-historical term for this is audacity. The human term is love.
The students
There is something quietly radical about the fact that Amoakohene was her student. The art world has a long tradition of the painter and the model — the genius and the muse, the observer and the observed — and the power always flows one way. Casteel scrambles it. She teaches these young people. She knows their names, their work, their lives. Then she paints them at seven feet tall and hangs them in the museum. The relationship is not painter-and-subject. It is teacher-and-student, neighbor-and-neighbor, and the painting is what happens when the hierarchy collapses into care.
Serwaa's presence makes the painting. A portrait of a young man alone would be a statement. A portrait of a young man with his mother is a world — it says: this person comes from somewhere, from someone, and the someone is here, on the couch, with her hand near his arm. The American tradition of the monumental male portrait is a tradition of isolation: the general alone, the industrialist alone, the genius alone. Casteel puts the mother in the frame, and the monument becomes a family.
The painting, again
Back on Floor 2, back to the couch. The painting hangs near the Alice Neel — two portraits of intimacy, forty years apart, in the same gallery. The Neel is small, dry, exact: two men at a kitchen table, painted in an apartment. The Casteel is enormous, lush, saturated: a mother and son in a room made of color. They are both about the same thing — what it looks like when someone you love sits still for you — and they could not be more different in how they say it.
Here is what I keep coming back to: the painting is called Serwaa and Amoakohene, not Mother and Son. The names matter. The history of art is full of mothers and sons — the Madonna and Child is the most painted subject in the Western tradition — but those are types. Serwaa and Amoakohene are people. Casteel insists on the specificity: this mother, this son, this couch, this room, these colors. The universal arrives through the particular, or it does not arrive at all.
Go stand in front of it and let the color do its work. Stand close enough to see the brushstrokes — the way the skin is built from strokes of purple and gold that should not work and do — and then step back and let the seven and a half feet do what seven and a half feet do. The room gets quiet. The couch holds. The mother and son look back at you, calm and unguarded, and for a second the museum feels less like a museum and more like someone's living room, which is exactly what the painting wanted. 🌁
Timeline — Jordan Casteel
1989 — born Denver, Colorado
Early 2010s — teaches in Colorado; paints in the evenings; decides the evenings are the real life
2014 — MFA, Yale University; Visible Man series: large nude portraits of Black men
Mid-2010s — moves to New York; residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem
2017 — Nights in Harlem: portraits of neighborhood men, monumental and tender
2019 — paints Serwaa and Amoakohene (with her student Amoakohene and his mother Serwaa); teaches at Rutgers University-Newark
2020 — Within Reach: first New York solo museum exhibition, New Museum; nearly forty paintings
Today — Serwaa and Amoakohene on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street (gift of the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection)