...her gaze roamed past the uptown intelligentsia, onto her neighbors in Spanish Harlem. A boy named Georgie Arce, who used to run errands for Neel, appears here in four drawings and a constricted painting, his ruffled black hair set off by a hot-pink background. Decades later, Arce would go to prison for murder — absorbed, perhaps, by the violence that Childress described in her books and that Arroyo fought to expunge from El Barrio. But he is preserved here in Neel’s hand, and in a sneering snapshot, a trace of a life not yet ground down. [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/arts/design/alice-neel-harlem.html] One of the kids who would sit for Neel was Georgie Arce, a boy she drew using ink on paper and painted in oil on canvas several times between 1950 and 1959, charting his growth from a child into a teenager. It’s intriguing to see the progression in these portraits of this lone but familiar figure: The early portraits of Arce show him as a sweet, almost angelic-looking child; however, as time goes on, one notices a marked change not only in his physicality as he becomes an adolescent, but in his furrowed brow and closed-off posture. You might wonder who and where his parents were, and you must also reckon with the knowledge, by way of a biographical note in the accompanying wall text, that Arce would eventually end up in prison, convicted of murder. [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/alice-neel-uptown-review/522495/]