Sea To Shining Sea

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings grapple with the issues of the day: politics, identity, and power. With a new solo exhibition at L.A.’s Nino Mier Gallery, she solidifies her spot as one of the country’s most important young artists.

- Margaret Wappler

In her skylighted studio near downtown Los Angeles, between cigarette drags that flutter ashes onto her dark denim and work boots, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer talks about identity as it relates to her art. “I’m an American painter. I make paintings about America,” she says, prompting the questions: Which America? And whose?

Vitally self-reflexive and saturated in color, Dupuy-Spencer’s figurative paintings and drawings capture the zeitgeist without sacrificing soul. Her work encompasses the full prism of her person: Caucasian. Queer (she identifies as nonbinary but uses feminine pronouns). A 38-year-old native of Rhinebeck, New York. An addict in recovery. A former landscaper. An atheist raised culturally Jewish. A country music lover. The owner of a cat named The River. Together, these disparate elements inform a perspective with a searing sense of intimacy. Her eye always turns to people, some fictional, some real. A childhood first love holding a fawn; a police officer turning off his body cam; her good friend and fellow artist Eve Fowler cuddling her dogs while making a collage. Infused throughout each work is the artist herself, searching for personal connection during a time of social and cultural upheaval.

Four years ago, Dupuy-Spencer was living in New Orleans, recovering from a heroin addiction that had sent her mother to New York City to rescue her. She wasn’t painting, even though she’d studied it at Bard under the painter Nicole Eisenman. “I had to quit being an artist 100 percent,” she says. “I was not interested in it anymore.” Dupuy-Spencer thought about going to grad school to become a drug counselor, but then “it turns out painting is actually part of who I am.” She moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles on a whim to be near friends, started working out of a garage in Silver Lake, and met Nino Mier, a gallerist who also represents Fowler.