“Sometimes [my subjects] are me. Sometimes they're an emotion I'm feeling. Sometimes they're a story that my best friend told me. Sometimes it's an observation of a feeling inside me that I'm processing.”

—Danielle McKinney

In To Pretend, 2020 Danielle McKinney captures a moment of stillness that pulses with quiet intensity. A solitary woman stands before a muted interior, her hands gently clasping a wedge of fruit. She wears a blue-and-white striped shirt rendered in tight, rhythmic lines, contrasting the looser brushwork of the surrounding scene. Her expression is unreadable—composed but distant—as though her gaze is turned inward. As with much of McKinney’s work, the painting occupies a space between the intimate and the symbolic, realism and reverie. Marking the first work by McKinney to appear at auction at Phillips—and only the fourth to be publicly offered—To Pretend distills the quiet beauty of everyday life while exemplifying the artist’s larger project: reframing art historical narratives through images that center Black womanhood, interiority, and self-possession.

The figure emerges from a rich ground of black gesso, a foundational layer McKinney has described as evoking the experience of being “in the dark room again,” referencing her background in photography.ⁱ This initial darkness is not just technical—it is metaphorical. It speaks to the subterranean work of image-making, of constructing visibility from shadows, of conjuring presence from interiority. McKninney’s practice, an inversion of the Western painting tradition that starts from white ground and builds toward form through light, places her within a lineage of artists such as Kerry James Marshall, who has also employed black surfaces as a strategy to center Black figures within a visual language that historically excluded them. In To Pretend, light is brought out from this darkness, lending her subjects a luminous dimensionality that echoes the chiaroscuro of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Francisco de Zurbarán, while refusing their historical marginalization of Black bodies. 

The composition recalls the formal clarity of early modernist portraiture—Henri Matisse’s use of bold, patterned clothing, or the introspective women of Paula Modersohn-Becker—but McKinney reorients these influences through a contemporary lens, centering a Black female figure steeped in comfortable languidity, her stillness charged with quiet defiance. She subverts the conventions of Matisse’s reclining women by transforming the trope of decorative repose into a declaration of selfhood, where leisure is not a projection of the artist’s desire but a site of autonomy and inward life. In To Pretend, that visual language is reclaimed to speak directly to histories of racialized representation—most notably through the vividly painted watermelon, rendered in high-chroma pink and green. Long burdened by caricature in American visual culture, the fruit becomes, in McKinney’s hands, neither satire nor symbol, but a humble object reinserted into a scene of dignity, care, and the quiet pleasure of daily ritual.

“It’s important for me to leave room for people to build their own story… The figure always comes first and then I create the interior around her”

—Danielle McKinney

The figure’s eyes are slightly off-center, resisting direct engagement, as though absorbed in a private world to which we are not granted full access. Like many of McKinney’s painted subjects, she is both here and elsewhere—grounded in her domestic surroundings, but subtly detached. Echoes of Johannes Vermeer’s contemplative domestic scenes can be felt in the muted palette of the background and the focus on a woman captured mid-thought. Yet McKinney shifts the center of gravity: the mirror behind the subject, a classic device of self-reflection and symbolic doubling in Western painting, offers no reflection. The absence calls attention to what traditional representation has historically erased—the interior life of Black women.

McKinney’s paintings are not portraits of specific individuals, yet they are shaped in part by her own experience of exclusion. She collects vintage magazines, sourced on eBay and in thrift stores, with a particular focus on Eisenhower-era decorating titles, Vogue, Ebony, and 1970s issues of Playboy. When a pose or interior catches her eye, she cuts it out and uses it as a template, creating collages that serve as the foundation for her paintings. “I never saw myself in a magazine,” she has said.ⁱⁱ “Meaning, a Black woman with Black skin.”ⁱⁱⁱ Her paintings are, in her words, “my way to show that”—a simple proposition, yet a radical one.^iv Crucially, McKinney’s subjects are not staged for consumption; they remain self-possessed, their gaze inward or elsewhere, withholding access. The title “To Pretend” complicates any fixed reading, suggesting the performative nature of visibility or the interior fictions we create to survive. “It’s important for me to leave room for people to build their own story,” McKinney has said, underscoring the openness at the heart of her work.^v In this quiet moment of looking and being looked at, McKinney conjures a space where history, identity, and imagination quietly coalesce.

“They just want to be in their own little worlds. I guess that’s me, in a way.”

—Danielle McKinney

Throughout her work, McKinney returns to the Black female figure not as symbol or stereotype, but as the protagonist of a rich, unseen interiority. While McKinney engages with race as a central theme, her focus on the inner lives of Black women—their stillness, introspection, and everyday rituals—pushes against an art historical tradition that has long reserved such depictions for white subjects. McKinney affirms her figures’ right to inhabit space on their own terms—unhurried, unbothered, and unapologetically at rest. “I can show us taking a nap and smoking a cigarette, butt naked on a sofa at the end of the day with red fingernail polish,” she said.^vi “I can show us [being] normal.”^vii

McKinney has spoken about her practice as one that gives her subjects the space “to simply exist.” The painting’s calm, compact dimensions intensify this ethos. Her paintings challenge the viewer not to look at, but to sit with—to accompany her subjects in moments of solitude, softness, reflection. To Pretend is neither ironic nor didactic; it is devotional, a compact but profound meditation on visibility, ritual, and the poetry of the mundane.

ⁱ Danielle Mckinney quoted in Steph Eckardt, “In the Studio with Danielle Mckinney, the Artist Bringing Intimate Moments to Life,” W Magazine, September 28 2022, online.
ⁱⁱ Danielle McKinney, quoted in M. H. Miller, “Danielle Mckinney Never Thought Her Paintings Would Be Seen Like This,” New York Times, February 17 2024, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Ibid.
^v Danielle McKinney, quoted in Annabel Keenan, “Danielle Mckinney Embraces the Golden Hour,” Cultured Magazine, October 12 2022, online.
^vi Danielle McKinney, quoted in M. H. Miller, “Danielle Mckinney Never Thought Her Paintings Would Be Seen Like This,” New York Times, February 17 2024, online.
^vii Ibid.