Atrium Project: Celeste Rapone

About the Exhibition

The MCA’s Atrium Project invites artists from all points in their careers to respond to the museum’s bright, two-story entrance through a new large-scale work. In the latest iteration of the series, painter Celeste Rapone presents Sideline (After Ben Shahn) (2025).

Rapone is an artist whose work centers intimacy, nostalgia, and the anxieties of daily life in the contemporary world, particularly as experienced by women. Several visual hallmarks of her work, such as the flattening of space and figure and the use of muted color palettes, allow her to accentuate the psychological complexity of her figures and hint at their connections to art historical approaches to representing the female body. Sideline (After Ben Shahn) cites another painting, Men on a Bench (1940) by the social realist painter Ben Shahn (b. 1898, Kaunas, Lithuania; d. 1969, New York, NY), an artist who depicted scenes of American life from the Great Depression on. Rapone’s revisiting of the painting features a languid, seated group of four women, their oversized limbs entwined and indistinguishable, their faces gazing out in plaintive resignation. The viewer joins these four women, anticipating something which never reveals itself.

Atrium Project: Celeste Rapone is organized by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator, with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant.