Juanita McNeely Painted Abortion’s Messy Truth

To enter Juanita McNeely’s exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is to experience literal tunnel vision: A long corridor, the European painting wing, lines your periphery with prismatic paintings and, at the end, just one canvas—hers—confronts you head on. McNeely’s portrait of a laboring mother, swathed in glowing fields of chartreuse, outshines (again, literally) art history’s greats. Walk toward it, gaze fixed, and canonical canvases that rhyme with hers