When doctors diagnosed Juanita McNeely, BFA ’59, with cancer during her first year at Washington University in St. Louis, they gave her three to six months to live and advised her to spend that time doing what made her happy. She chose to continue painting.
Contrary to physicians’ initial prognoses, the cancer went into remission, and McNeely built a decadeslong career painting raw, unflinching works that transformed personal trauma into powerful statements about the female experience. She later remarked in an interview that her cancer diagnosis as a college student motivated her to portray “things that perhaps most people even feel uncomfortable about looking at, much less talking about.”
Her paintings, which have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, are intimately connected with her lifelong health struggles. “Juanita had thick skin,” says her husband, New York-based artist Jeremy Lebensohn. “Her health issues just kept on coming. But she would never, ever give in.”
After McNeely died in fall 2023, Lebensohn made a $2 million bequest to endow the Juanita McNeely Scholarship for graduate students in WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. He also made an outright pledge of $250,000, to be paid over five years, so students could begin benefitting from the scholarship during his lifetime.
“Juanita McNeely’s visceral work continues to leave a striking impression on viewers,” says Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School and E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts. “The medical challenges she faced throughout her life did not intimidate her but instead fueled her artistic drive. We are so grateful for this scholarship, which will help fuel the next generation of creative changemakers to emerge from the Sam Fox School.”
Fostering future artists
As director of the College of Art and Graduate School of Art, Amy Hauft understands the financial challenges facing students who choose artistic careers. “Graduate arts education offers a distinctive academic pathway compared to more traditional professional programs,” she says. “It takes a lot of money to educate and prepare our students for success in securing exhibitions, grants, commissions, and awards. It’s kind of an act of faith.”
“Juanita and I were not wealthy growing up. She believed, and I agree, that it’s hugely important to help students who may not be able to afford graduate study and allow them to continue their creative work.”
Jeremy Lebensohn
The Juanita McNeely Scholarship will help the Sam Fox School recruit the most talented applicants and enable them to pursue their artistic visions with fewer financial constraints. The gift supports WashU’s continued efforts to increase financial resources and create a best-in-class experience for undergraduate and graduate students.
“Juanita and I were not wealthy growing up,” Lebensohn says. “She believed, and I agree, that it’s hugely important to help students who may not be able to afford graduate study and allow them to continue their creative work.”
Fearless artistic vision
McNeely was born in Ferguson, Missouri, in 1936. Visits to the nearby Saint Louis Art Museum shaped her early artistic sensibility. There, she viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Max Beckmann, who taught painting at WashU from 1947 to 1949. At age 15, she earned a scholarship for her first oil painting. As an undergraduate, she discovered a mentor in Werner Drewes, a professor and abstract painter and printmaker who had trained at the Bauhaus school in Germany.
After her cancer diagnosis, she found drawing from models tedious and preferred to replicate the human form from memory. “She would take an immediate snapshot in her head and paint from that,” Lebensohn recalls. After a trial period, her professors allowed her to continue painting without a reference because her understanding of the human form was so intuitive.
McNeely taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than a year after graduating from WashU and then earned a Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. In 1967, she moved to New York, where she joined the feminist art group Fight Censorship and became a fearless advocate for women’s artistic expression.
Through her art, she confronted taboo subjects like menstruation and female sexuality. Her health struggles and experiences with misogyny became the foundation for some of her most significant work, including “Is It Real? Yes, It Is!” (1969), whose nightmarish subject matter takes inspiration from another cancer scare. When McNeely sought treatment for a life-threatening tumor, her doctors resisted performing a hysterectomy to remove it once they determined she was also pregnant. After considerable stress and uncertainty, she eventually received the care she needed at another hospital.
McNeely met Lebensohn in the early 1970s, and the pair married in France in 1982. She suffered a spinal cord injury that confined her to a wheelchair not long after the wedding. Defying doctors’ proclamations that she would never make another large-scale painting, she produced the 13-canvas “Triskaidekaptych” (1986) over the course of a year. She taught painting and printmaking for 17 years at Suffolk County Community College and continued to create and exhibit for many years.
“Juanita’s years at WashU torched a fire in her,” Lebensohn says. “There was no stopping her from becoming an artist after that.” Now, his scholarship gift will help ensure that her fearless creativity inspires future artists to push boundaries and challenge conventions as she did.
“It’s easy for young artists to be discouraged by rejection or become guided into painting something that isn’t genuine,” he says. “I can’t think of a better way to pay tribute to Juanita than to create an opportunity for other artists to follow her example. I know it’s what she would have wanted.”
Help create more opportunities for WashU students by making a gift for scholarships and fellowships today.
