‘What Comes Up, Comes Out’ In Beverly McIver Paintings

Thank you. Thank you, Beverly McIver.

Thank you for giving that much of yourself in your paintings so that we may find comfort knowing we are not along in our hardships.

Those hardships may be racism.

Beverly McIver (b. 1962) grew up in segregated Greensboro, N.C. She hadn’t considered why she was attracted to being a clown and painting her face white, masking her skin color, until a little white girl at a party saw McIver’s arm under her costume and screamed, “the clown is Black!”

She painted that.

Those hardships may be caregiving a mentally disabled relative. That relationship was the focus of a documentary released in 2011 and distributed by HBO, “Raising Renee.”

She paints that.

Those hardships may be poverty, meeting your father at 17 and then having to care for him in his dying days, seeing family members with their legs amputated because of diabetes, personal medical scares, depression. McIver has experienced them all.

She paints that, too.

All of this–not merely a life’s work, but a life–can be seen now through August 6, 2023, at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston where “Beverly McIver: Full Circle” delivers an overwhelming opus to the predicament of the human condition.

The degree of openness and vulnerability in McIver’s work is shocking, it being a rarity finding anyone willing to candidly reveal themselves so thoroughly in a world predicated on artifice and vanity. McIver’s paintings, like Frida Kahlo’s heart wrenching self-portraits, eclipse the category of fine art and enter a pantheon of publicly exposed raw autobiography with the likes of Sylvia Plath poetry, Merle Haggard ballads, or Tig Notaro’s standup comedy.

Some of the paintings are so sensitive, even one of McIver’s most faithful and trusted confidants–exhibition curator Kim Boganey at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art where “Full Circle” debuted–begged her not to show them.

“When I made the ‘Depression’ paintings, because I was depressed, it was this overwhelming feeling of I just can't get my head off of the table,” McIver told Forbes.com of the feeling and images she painting. “I called (Kim) and said, “what do you think about this?’ She said, ‘I think they're lovely, but don't ever show them in public because it’s too much information.’ Of course, I ignored her.”

Why?

“My job as a as a conscious human being is to move aside and let whatever's inside come out,” McIver said. “Over the years, I've trained myself to do that, just surrender because I feel like telling these very, very true stories about what it means to be human.”

What comes up, comes out.

She doesn’t enter her studio planning to paint a portrait of her father or sister that day, she enters with an extraordinary bank of personal experiences and an equally extraordinary talent with a brush and paint. What happens next?

“What comes up, comes out,” she said.

McIver didn’t always paint this way. She began with still lifes–lemons and oranges. But she went to graduate school at Penn State specifically to study with Richard Mayhew who, in a moment, transformed her career.

“I'll never forget, he brought this portrait of this Black woman that he had done into my studio, and said, ‘do you like this?’” McIver remembers. “And I said ‘yeah!’ and he said, ‘It's okay to paint Black people’ and he just left my studio. I was like, ‘oh, my God!’”

In the 25 years since, McIver has produced an unflinching body of work–gorgeous paintings–for which no topic has proven too sensitive to depict.

“I don't ever think, ‘oh God, this is too personal,’ because it's all coming from what it means to be human and what it means to experience life,” McIver said. “We just don't talk about certain things like death, or depression, mental illness, or having someone special in the family, we just sort of, as a society, we don't deal with any of those things.”

McIver does. All of them.

The uncommon degree with which she exposes herself through her art, naturally, elicits intense reactions to her paintings.

“The room was full of people who came up to me and said, ‘can I give you a hug,’” McIver said of the opening reception to “Full Circle” at the Gibbes. “I was thinking in my head, ‘is this hug for me or for you?’”

Director of Curatorial Affairs for the Gibbes, Sara Arnold, has seen those emotions as well.

“It's been one of the most incredible reactions to an exhibition that I can remember,” she said. “There were people brought to tears viewing the paintings which I've never seen in the galleries. People really found their own stories.”

They always do.

“The paintings hold up a mirror to whoever the viewer is,” she said. “If you are coming to the painting and you look at it and you can't go beyond the surface, or the color, the lusciousness of the paint, that's all you want to see from the painting, then you can stop there, but if you want to go deeper, conceptually speaking, being uncomfortable about change and differences, growing, just being human and flawed, you can get that too.”

Not all viewers are ready for that, however.

“People who feel uncomfortable with the work will say things to me like, ‘wow, I can see you're really using your paint as therapy,’ or, they'll say something like, ‘you've over-shared;’ I say, ‘well, I'm just talking about humanity,’” McIver explains. “This one woman said to me, ‘but your sense of humanity is over the top way more than what is normal.’ I thought, ‘wow, she’s in denial.’”

McIver doesn’t consider herself more humane than the average person, that is debatable, what is not in question is her exceptional willingness to reveal her humanity across its full spectrum of emotions.

“I'm willing to own it and say, ‘this sucks,’ and not make caretaking some glamorous, selfless act. It’s hard work; it's a pain in the ass, and you can't help if you're a caretaker be happy that you are able to take care of your loved one, but at the same time, it's not some selfless act that supports good feelings,” she said, referring to the decades she’s taken care of Renee following their mother’s death.

McIver has the unique ability of making her personal experiences universal. Her paintings communicate that not only am I going through this, but that we’re going through this.

“The commonality is the human part,” she said. “I think people are just refreshed to see somebody telling the truth, being authentic.”

No doubt.

“It's my gift from God; it’s my voice and it's my power and it’s unapologetically who I am,” McIver said.

She’s also quick to note that her life has been full of love and joy along with its hardships. She hopes her paintings–and life–can be inspirational, as well as reassuring.

“I think it gives others hope that you can be on welfare, from the projects, and everybody around you doing other things like selling drugs and you can actually get a college degree and be a professor at Duke and have this great gift of sharing your voice and offering it as sort of a hug to what it means to be a human being and what it means to suffer,” McIver said.

As for Renee, she had already called her sister three times on the day the interview for this story took place. She’s 63 now, and while she’s lived on her own for more than 10 years, Beverly McIver says she’s becoming frail, is legally blind in one eye and needs a walker to get around. Renee wants to move back in with her sister.

Beverly registers the disappointment in Renee’s voice when telling her “no,” and the guilt within herself for doing so. Beverly McIver will be looking to find Renee a more active care environment, and you can bet, somewhere down the road, she’ll paint that too.