Rose Art Museum to present Danielle Mckinney’s solo US museum debut in 2025

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University will present “Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More,” the first solo museum exhibition in the United States for the acclaimed painter. The show, which runs from Aug. 20, 2025, through Jan. 4, 2026, is organized in conjunction with Mckinney’s 2025 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence award.

Curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori, the Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, the exhibition will showcase 13 intimate paintings, including two new works centered on 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,” Ankori said in a statement. “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.”

Mckinney’s paintings draw from art historical traditions of figurative painting while challenging colonial and patriarchal perspectives. Her works reclaim and reframe the odalisque motif, with some paintings depicting nude figures in poses of unguarded confidence and others portraying women surrounded by books, textiles and art — environments of reflection and ritual. The subjects are presented as active, self-possessed individuals suspended in worlds of their own creation.

“Mckinney’s work emerges in dialogue with a wide-ranging art historical lineage,” Ankori noted. “These references are neither nostalgic nor deferential: they are recalibrated through her personal sensibility and a distinct contemporary lens.”

The exhibition’s title painting, “Tell Me More” (2023), features a woman in burnt sienna reclined on her side, one hand resting on the floor as smoke curls from her cigarette. With subtle color and pared-down surroundings, the composition focuses attention on the figure, whose pose both invokes and resists art-historical conventions.

“Painting is a spiritual act for me,” Mckinney said. “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 pursuing painting full time in 2020, Mckinney trained as a photographer while earning an MFA. That background continues to influence her visual style, evoking cinematic tension and moments thick with emotional nuance. Her shift from lens to brush expanded her ability to depict the psychological depth and inner worlds of her subjects.

“Danielle Mckinney: Tell Me More” offers viewers a chance to encounter the contemplative, powerful vision of a painter whose work explores Black femininity through nuanced and self-assured imagery.