Beverly McIver is widely recognized for her powerful, deeply personal paintings that confront issues of identity, race, family, and the shifting definitions of beauty and resilience. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, McIver rose to prominence in the 1990s with portraits that combined expressive brushwork and bold color to tell stories drawn from her own life and the communities around her.

Throughout her career, McIver has used painting not only as a mode of self-expression but also as an act of testimony, bearing witness to her family, her community, and the broader struggle for visibility and dignity. By intertwining autobiography with broader cultural themes, her work achieves both intimacy and universality, placing her among the most important contemporary voices in American figurative painting.

McIver frequently places herself in her paintings as a clown. The earliest clown self-portraits stem from her experiences in a high school clown club. Performing in whiteface and a blond wig, she found a liberating anonymity free from the labels of race and poverty.  Reversing this mask, McIver donned blackface instead of white to reclaim her Black identity and confront ugly stereotypes and painful racial imagery.

McIver, the first in her family to attend college, received a BFA in painting and drawing from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in painting and drawing from Pennsylvania State University. Since then, her work had received much public and critical acclaim, and has featured in numerous exhibitions. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), as well as awards from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Rome Prize Fellowship in Visual Arts. Currently she is the Ebenshade Professor of the Practice in Studio Arts at Duke University.

In 2022  a major survey exhibition of her work was mounted at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.  Titled, Full Circle, this exhibition also traveled to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and the Gibbes Museum, Charleston, SC.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Selected Recent Exhibitions

Solo Exhibition (title TBD), Albion College, Albion, MI, 2025

Class of 2024 Induction Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NC, 2025

We Belong Here: The Gutierrez Collection, Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC, 2025

Recent Acquisitions of Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC, 2024

An Introspective Retrospective, Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 2023

Dear God, and Loving in Black and White, CONTAINER, Santa Fe, NM, 2023

Full Circle, Southestern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, 2022

Passage, Craven Allen Gallery, Durham, NC, 2022

Full Circle, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ, 2022

The Light Within, Craven Allen Gallery, Durham, NC, 2021

Beverly McIver, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 2021

Beverly McIver:  New Work, Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, NY, 2020