Rose Art Museum to Present TELL ME MORE, Danielle Mckinney’s Solo U.S. Museum Debut

The Rose Art Museum will present 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.

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.