Beverly McIver is a respected artist and academic with numerous exhibitions, honors, and fellowships to her name, but she almost took an entirely different career path: she almost became a clown. Growing up in the 1960s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and attending a primarily white high school, McIver found freedom and protection behind the caked-on makeup and flamboyant clothes worn by members of the school’s clown club. “As a clown,” she has said, “I was transformed, and in many ways more acceptable to society. No one cared that I was black or poor. I was embraced.” Many of the self-portraits in this exhibition—which surveys almost 50 works from the last 25 years—depict McIver in classic clown makeup. The vibrant colors are beautiful, but the power of her painting is in the way she captures emotion, individuality, and humanity. —Paulina Prosnitz