Rose Art Museum Presents Tell Me More, the Painter Danielle Mckinney’s Solo U.S. Museum Debut
Danielle Mckinney, Tell Me More, 2023. Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa. © Danielle Mckinney. Photo credit: Pierre Le Hors.
(Waltham, MA, June 2025) — The Rose Art Museum is delighted to announce Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More, the prodigious painter’s solo U.S. museum debut. On view from August 20, 2025, through January 4, 2026, this landmark exhibition is organized in conjunction with Mckinney’s 2025 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose. The show is curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, Rose Art Museum, and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University. Tell Me More features thirteen intimate paintings—including two new works—that portray the interior lives of Black women.
“Danielle Mckinney redefines figuration, offering a bold reimagining of introspection, resistance, and a meditative spirituality embedded in everyday life,” said Ankori. “Her protagonists are autonomous figures who inhabit a space and a time marked by individual rhythms and pauses, disregarding the tempo of the outside world. Tell Me More reveals the quiet radicality of Mckinney’s vision.”
Drawing from art historical traditions of figurative painting while upending their colonial and patriarchal gazes, Mckinney reclaims and reframes the odalisque motif. In some works, nude figures lounge with unguarded confidence, asserting agency and control in the act of being seen. In others, she depicts women in richly appointed rooms filled with books, textiles, and artworks—spaces of reflection and ritual. These are not passive subjects but women suspended in self-contained and self-created worlds, their gestures, expressions, and environments imbued with emotional charge and self-empowerment.
“Mckinney’s work emerges in dialogue with a wide-ranging art historical lineage,” noted Ankori. “These references are neither nostalgic nor deferential—they are recalibrated through her personal sensibility and a distinct contemporary lens. Her protagonists, imbued with agency and rich interior worlds, rewrite the visual language of composure, power, and visibility.”
The painting Tell Me More (2023), from which the exhibition takes its title, encapsulates many of the artist’s core concerns. The composition, rendered in a subtle and restrained palette, depicts a woman in vibrant burnt sienna reclining on her side, her hand resting lightly on the floor as smoke curls from her cigarette into the darkened air. Her pose evokes art-historical precedents of reclining female figures, but the torso’s twisted specificity and the angle of the head resist the formulaic trope and undo stereotypical readings. The surrounding space is ambiguous and pared-down, directing focus to the figure’s luminous presence and understated drama of the moment. With her vermilion fingernails and flowing garment echoing Baroque draperies, the woman appears to slow down time in this self-contained and sensuous composition.
“Painting is a spiritual act for me,” Mckinney stated. “Each canvas is a portal—a place where I explore the soul, the self, and what it means to be free within one’s own space. In these works, I’m creating a language of interiority that resists interruption.”
Before fully embracing painting in 2020, Mckinney trained as a photographer, earning an MFA and cultivating a visual language grounded in observation, atmosphere, and narrative construction. That photographic sensibility continues to inform her paintings, which often evoke the cinematic tension of a film still—arrested moments thick with emotional resonance and suggestive ambiguity. Her transition from lens to brush was not a rupture but a natural progression that enabled a more expansive inquiry into personal terrain and psychic space. This shift opened new possibilities for exploring the inner lives of her subjects with heightened intimacy and symbolic depth.
Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More offers a tantalizing entry point into the intimate world of a gifted painter whose powerful vision of Black femininity is expansive, contemplative, and defiantly unhurried.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981, Montgomery, AL) lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. She earned her BFA at Atlanta College of Art in 2005 and her MFA at Parsons School of Design in 2013. McKinney has been the subject of two solo international exhibitions: Danielle McKinney. Fly on the Wall at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy; and Danielle Mckinney: about a moment – in a moment, Kuntshal n in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions, including Presence in the Pause: Interiority and its Radical Immanence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE; When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at The Contemporary Austin, TX; and Black Melancholia at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; The Time Is Always Now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; A New Subjectivity 1979/2024 at the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill. NY. Mckinney's work is in numerous museum collections, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
PRESS CONTACT
For more information or to access the press kit, contact Chad Sirois, Associate Director of Communications and Marketing, or call 508.612.5128.
PRESS PREVIEW
The Rose Art Museum will host a press preview on Tuesday, August 19, 10 am–1 pm. RSVP to the press preview by filling out this form. Please contact chadsirois@brandeis.edu with any questions about photography.
FREE PUBLIC PROGRAMS
A public reception celebrating the exhibition will take place on September 10, 2025, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. A series of in-person and virtual public programs will be offered in conjunction with Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More. As details are confirmed, more information about these programs and how to register will be available on the museum’s website.
EXHIBITION SUPPORT
Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More is supported by the Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award Fund and Marianne Boesky Gallery.
ABOUT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
Rose Art Museum fosters community, experimentation, and scholarship through direct engagement with modern and contemporary art, artists, and ideas. Founded in 1961, the Rose is among the nation’s preeminent university art museums and houses one of New England's most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art. Through its exceptional collection, support of emerging artists, and innovative programming, the museum serves as a nexus for art and social justice at Brandeis University and beyond. Located just 20 minutes from downtown Boston, Rose Art Museum is open Wednesdays–Sundays, 11 AM–5 PM. Admission is free.
Follow the Rose Art Museum on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #