Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, a painter whose work dealt with racism and upheaval in an America riven by inequalities, died at her home in Los Angeles on Friday. She was 46. Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which will open a Dupuy-Spencer show in LA next week, announced her death on Saturday morning, but did not state a cause.
Dupuy-Spencer moved freely between unflinching images of protests and tender pictures of intimacy. She was just as likely to paint a fallen Confederate monument as she was to capture sexually frank images of lovers in bed. All of the subjects she painted, she said, were “things that are meaningful to me.”
In many cases, her subject matter was often explicitly political and highly legible. In 2021, she was profiled by multiple magazines for painting the January 6 insurrection. The resultant work, titled Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning (2021), is a feverish pile-up of figures toting guns and American flags before the Capitol building. Sigmund Freud appears amid the crowd; the painting’s title refers to a line from Interpretation of Dreams.
Of that painting, Dupuy-Spencer said, she was thinking of how “disturbances that happen outside the sleeper are incorporated into the dream,” as she told Artnet News. “In case of emergency, those are pulled in, and the dream wakes the dreamer up.” Moreover, she said, “I was thinking of the dream as a critique of the American Dream.”
That painting, like many of the others she did, collapsed pictorial space, creating a flattening effect that diverges from life itself. “Often, I’m trying to paint something realistically and then I fuck it up and attempt to make that into a good painting,” she told Bomb in 2018.
In that same interview, she said her work had to be read through the lens of class and whiteness—her whiteness—but she expressed reservations about how much her queerness had to do with her art. She was explicit about her queer identity: she later stated in interviews that she began injecting hormones as part of a gender transition. “I definitely do not identify with being a woman,” she told Los Angeles Magazine in a 2021 profile. “I’m trans, masculine presenting.” (She often said any pronouns could be used to describe her; ARTnews has used she/her pronouns for this obituary.) But she told Bomb in 2018 that analyzing all her work through her queerness was “presumptuous, even kind of violent.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, 2021.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
In the years before her Bomb interview, Dupuy-Spencer experienced a meteoric rise to fame. She was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, making her one of the few painters in a show that focused more on sculpture. The next year, she appeared in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial. Anne Ellegood, a curator of that edition, called her “one of the great painters of her generation” in an Elle profile of the artist.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer was born in New York in 1979. Her father was Scott Spencer, a novelist. Her mother was Coco Dupuy, whom Los Angeles Magazine described as “a descendent of New Orleans aristocracy with some talent of her own for painting.” When Dupuy-Spencer was three, the family relocated to Rhinebeck, in Upstate New York; her parents divorced a decade later.
By the time she was 14, Dupuy-Spencer had started drinking and taking drugs, and by 17, she had begun shooting up heroin. The Rhinecliff Hotel, a storied dive bar near Rhinebeck, became her favored drinking spot and, later, the subject of a painting by her. After a brief stint at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dupuy-Spencer returned to Rhinebeck, where she took up work as a landscaper.
Dupuy-Spencer began studying art at Bard College, where her teachers included the celebrated painters Nicole Eisenman and Amy Sillman. Yet Dupuy-Spencer continued to struggle personally and financially, hurting her prospects of completing her art education. “Nicole and Amy grabbed me one day in the middle of the hall and brought me into Amy’s office and they were like, ‘What the fuck? You’re a really good painter and you’re queer and you’re a feminist. It’s your responsibility to take this seriously,’” she told Los Angeles Magazine. “No one had ever spoken to me like I had potential.”
Though Dupuy-Spencer never finished her Bard education, she became well-connected through it. She dated artist K8 Hardy, and when she moved to New York, she became friendly with A. L. Steiner and Leidy Churchman.
While her career began taking off, with placements in group shows of queer artists at galleries such as New York’s Invisible-Exports and Los Angeles’s Ohwow, Dupuy-Spencer stayed clean for a period. But amid a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and what Los Angeles Magazine described as “the social pressures of her New York life,” she relapsed and attempted suicide. In 2012, the artist’s mother brought her and her dog Freeway to a New Orleans rehab, where she stayed for six months. She stayed on there afterward, this time as an employee.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Veterans Day, 2016.
Whitney Museum
In the 2018 Bomb interview, she would describe her New Orleans period as a freeing one, even though she thought her art career had reached its end. “I was desperate for many years to keep my addiction a secret and get clean, and that became really present in my work but in a lot of coded ways,” she said. “Luckily, the people in the group I was running with were completely oblivious, so I got to keep my anonymity around it, which ultimately led to them feeling absolutely betrayed.”
In 2014, Dupuy-Spencer moved to Los Angeles, where she linked back up with artist friends such as Mariah Garnett and Eve Fowler, who later became Dupuy-Spencer’s romantic partner. Fowler appeared in some of Dupuy-Spencer’s works from that period, including Eve (2018), a work in which the artist sits at a table strewn with an open book and a pair of scissors as two barking dogs seek her attention.
Another work from this era, Veterans Day (2016), features a flow of musical notes that surround a framed newspaper article about the conviction of Muhammad Ali for refusing to fight in the American war in Vietnam and an old photograph of soldiers raising their fists. “One of the things that’s happening in my work is like a sympathy for, not in a pitiful way, but sort of sympathy for humanity,” Dupuy-Spencer told the Whitney Museum when that painting appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
She continued to paint explicitly political subject matter right up to the end. Amid Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza in 2023, Dupuy-Spencer began making paintings in support of the Palestinian cause. In 2024, Dupuy-Spencer painted Back to Where the Start Ended (“A Greeting to You from the Mud”), which the Jewish artist described as “Israeli soldiers marching through a bloodbath of Gaza looking frazzled and lost. To their shock they’re being confronted not by Hamas as their greatest enemy, but the giant golem of their past, embodied in the soldier described by Yosef Diamont in Tantura, who, in order to ‘build’ Israel, burned Palestinians alive with his flame thrower while chasing them from their ancestral homes.”
The painting, she said on Instagram, was “trying to envision history as not a straight line but as more of a lasagna.”
Her statements in support of Palestine led to condemnation from some Jewish groups, including one that accused her of “Jew hatred.” In September, she posted a screenshot of one such post to Instagram, writing that she was “proud” of it. “I don’t care what they do to me,” she wrote. “Why would I duck and hide from fascists.”
