Who Are You? Identity in Art Without the Existential Crisis
Alice Neel
Who the hell am I? Artists have been wrestling with this question for centuries. But here’ the thing: identity isn’t a singular, fixed thing. It’s a moving target, shaped by history, culture, personal baggage, and sometimes just the mood you woke up in. Good art has a way of making that mess visible; sometimes elegantly, sometimes aggressively, but always in a way that makes you look.
At its core, identity in art is about representation. Not just in the “who gets to be painted” way, but in the “how do you see yourself, and how do others see you” way. Artists have been working through this since we were doodling on cave walls. Those drawing were declarations of identity. Fast-forward a few millennia, and things have only gotten more complicated.
Take Alice Neel. Instead of painting idealized, polished portraits, she gave us raw, unfiltered versions of her subjects. Wrinkles, tension, vulnerability—it’s all right there. She painted exactly who those people were. It’s the opposite of a LinkedIn headshot. The way she saw her subjects—and the way they were willing to be seen—was the whole point.
Cindy Sherman
And then you’ve got artists who take it even further, treating identity like a game of dress-up. Cindy Sherman built an entire career on it, using herself as a blank canvas to become whoever she wanted—Hollywood starlet, washed-up diva, suburban mom on the verge of a breakdown. Through her work, she proves that identity is fluid, performative, and sometimes a little absurd.
Zanele Muholi’s striking photographs document and celebrate Black LGBTQ+ lives in South Africa, reclaiming a space that’s been historically ignored or erased. Jean-Michel Basquiat used his work to explore race, power, and colonialism, smashing together graffiti, fine art, and history to challenge who gets to tell the story of identity in the first place.
Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi
And let’s not pretend the art world itself isn’t part of the equation. Identity isn’t just about who makes the art, it’s about who decides what’s “good,” who gets the big gallery shows, and whose work ends up in museums instead of on the reject pile. Traditionally, the art world has favored a very specific demographic (old, white, male), but that’s shifting (somewhat).
Jean-Michel Basquiat
So, what’s the takeaway? Art is here to complicate things, to ask better questions, and to challenge what you think you know about yourself and others. It’s a conversation that never really ends.