This raises the whole issue of skin color and Neel’s unique position north of 96th Street and in art history. Her empathy for the people she shared life with was more than a political posture, though it was obviously initiated by political sentiment. As an enthusiastic member of the neighborhood (El Barrio translates as “the neighborhood”) she had to invent ways of painting people who did not look like academy models. Formulas based on traditional academic teaching informed most art school curricula, including that of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design) where Neel studied in the 1920s. These formulas were designed to render white European faces, and account for the artist’s early reliance on tenebrism. It seems obvious strolling in the gallery from one canvas to the other that the Neel behind Horace Clayton, 1949 is not the same Neel behind Kanuthia, 1973. By studying the human race as it actually looks, Alice Neel prepared the contemporary portrait painter for a world still emerging into the light 30 years after her death. (https://hamptonsarthub.com/2017/03/27/reviews-art-review-alice-neel-portraits-explore-the-true-colors-of-the-human-race/)