Introducing – Danielle Mckinney Beyond the Brushstroke

Beyond the Brushstroke is a small-sized artist monograph with a big difference. A new kind of hybrid deep dive into an artist, which showcases young rising star Danielle Mckinney’s powerful renderings of inner lives while encouraging readers to explore and nurture their own. Mckinney’s mother Barbara has written fifty prompts for reflection (each includes a key word, inspirational text, and question) to accompany the fifty featured paintings in the book, but there is also a 48-page journal section at the back for readers to write their own responses. The modest size of the book speaks to the size of the artist’s work - many of McKinney’s paintings are around 20-inches tall, only slightly larger than the book, allowing it to be easily carried and used as a journal. The cover features an image featured on a 2024 Lady Dior bag.

Born in Montgomery, AL in 1981, Danielle Mckinney is a rising star in the art world. Her cinematic paintings of the inner worlds of Black women - in moments of rest or contemplation - quickly garnered her a devoted following on social media and subsequent representation by Marianne Boesky Gallery. In terms of composition and technique, her work references the Dutch Old Masters and giants of the twentieth century. Mckinney evokes the work of Matisse while the striking quality of light in her scenes - and its narrative implications - echo the paintings of Vermeer. Her work also addresses a significant gap in representation. Set in dream-like domestic interiors, Mckinney's figures sprawl across unmade beds, lounge in overstuffed armchairs, and splay on the floor in various stages of undress. They smoke, read, and nap; immersed in their own worlds, ensconced in their own space, consumed with rest, pleasure, leisure, and being.

“I can show us [Black women] taking a nap and smoking a cigarette, butt naked on a sofa at the end of the day with red fingernail polish,” she recently told The New York Times. “I can show us normal.”

McKinney is a fixture of the Boesky booth at Frieze (her solo booth in 2023 was a sellout success) and Art Basel. Her work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Blenheim Art Foundation, Oxfordshire, England, among others. Take a look at Beyond the Brushstroke in the store.