To enter Juanita McNeely’s exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is to experience literal tunnel vision: A long corridor, the European painting wing, lines your periphery with prismatic paintings and, at the end, just one canvas—hers—confronts you head on. McNeely’s portrait of a laboring mother, swathed in glowing fields of chartreuse, outshines (again, literally) art history’s greats. Walk toward it, gaze fixed, and canonical canvases that rhyme with hers flitter by: Picasso’s portrait of a beleaguered matriarch, Andre Derain’s scene of a petite man straining to wrap his arm around a woman half a foot taller than he, and Max Beckmann’s strewn, possibly handcuffed odalisque watched over by a spindly crouching nude.

McNeely, who was born in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, and studied at St. Louis’s Washington University, grew up admiring the works that line this wing. Their influence isn’t hard to see, especially that of Beckmann and other German Expressionists. If only the feminist painter, who died in 2023 at the age of 87, had lived to see the world catch up to her tender triumphs. This two-venue hometown museum survey, folded into the city’s Counterpublic Triennial, continues at the nearby Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM)—and is an absolute smash.

Part of the lag in her recognition owes, I suspect, to the fact that, as much as her work builds on paintings from the past, it was also very much ahead of its time. As an art student in the 1950s, McNeely was diagnosed with cancer, so when feminist art and discourse soon after came to center on empowerment, independence, and strength, her experience did not fit neatly in. Instead, she dared to paint the more complicated truth: that women’s bodies are vulnerable like everyone else’s. As feminists fought patriarchy’s attempt to render women vulnerable socially and leave us dependent on men for money and more, the all-too-human inevitability of vulnerability and dependence got lost in the muck.

When you finally make it to see McNeely’s painting of a radiant mother up close, you see that there is not one muscle relaxed in her body: Holding a baby, her jaw is clenched, her fingers stretched, her toes tucked under. Who cares for the caregiver? she seems to ask. It seems revealing that “caregiver” and “caretaker” mean the same thing.

Time and again, McNeely painted women balancing precariously. Often, they are spindly and bald. This might read as sickly; regardless, her figures are rarely relaxed, and instead vivacious and embattled. There is one exception at SLAM: a painting of a pair of friends reclining at last, with the help of two canine companions, one of whom blissfully enjoys a belly scratch.

McNeely exhibited clear command of anatomy, yet showed little interest in normalcy or naturalism: Like the best artists, she mastered the rules only to break them. The figure’s legs in Moving My Chair (2019) are nearly twice the length of her torso, and here as in nearly every foot McNeely painted, toes are flagrantly flexed. Hyperextended, her long legs only emphasize the figure’s thrust backward as she reaches to grab the furniture. Made after McNeely became a wheelchair user following an accident, it reads as a portrayal of an act once carried out unthinkingly—swapping seats—that now requires consideration, strain, and strength.

Cancer and then disability were not the only experiences to leave McNeely’s body undone. She is best known for Is It Real? Yes It Is! (1969), which portrays her dangerous, illegal, and life-saving abortion, an experience she managed to capture in its requisite complexity. The scene is gruesome, but not graphic, evoking less what it looked like than what it must have felt like. It shows intense surgical scenes, but is rendered in swirling jewel tones and with glittering gusto. Still now, in our polarized times with women’s lives and autonomy on the line, one rarely finds space for both truths: that abortion can be a loss and a gain. No one should have to endure a procedure as unsafe as hers, yet even safety doesn’t always guarantee respite from fear, pain, and grief—feelings that one-note sloganeering about empowerment relegate to a lonely darkness.

Is It Real? Yes It Is! is McNeely’s magnum opus, and it’s as fresh and relevant now as it must have been then. It is owned by the Whitney and not on view in St. Louis. In fact, all but three of the dozen or so works on view are on loan from her gallery’s inventory, unsold. There are gems to be sure, but we’ll have to wait for a fleshed-out show that includes her greatest hits. One exception is the knockout Triskaidekaptych (1986), which is now on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis but otherwise belongs in an unnamed private collection.

In Triskaidekaptych’s 13 panels, as in three ceramic vessels on view at SLAM, one is prompted to read a narrative scene linearly, from left to right—only to find that McNeely’s scenes of bodily pleasure and pain loop and fold, images of ecstasy and agony never marching toward a resolution. Her works are as ambiguous as they are bold: We don’t know what to make, for instance, of her paintings’ gravity and ground. Figures rendered in fuchsia and goldenrod appear to fly, or float, or fall; one, in Triskaidekaptych, balances only on her big toe and pronounced cheekbone, either weightlessly breakdancing or having her face smashed into the asphalt. She and others are surrounded by lines and hooks: Are they scaffolding or strings, supports or restraints? The hook in one panel evokes Chaïm Soutine, who painted slaughterhouses while keeping kosher, fascinated and horrified by the carnival of carcasses that to others had been normalized. McNeely’s riff shows a toe (flexed, as ever) hoisted from the ceiling, the rest of the figure an illegible mass of guts and bones. Art history is full of artists like McNeely and Soutine, on society’s margins and empathizing with our species’ cold, systematic violence toward other animals. Add to the list Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Rosa Bonheur.

McNeely painted this suite of panels just after that 1982 spinal injury left her in a wheelchair, when her doctors warned her that making large paintings would be a challenge. That hardly deterred her. The work immerses you as it turns a corner. Painting panels that total an unlucky number 13, it’s as if McNeely wanted to show you how misfortune might be turned into something beautiful. Hers is an art of transmutation, but one that never shies from showing you the pain it’s made from, at once hopeful and unflinching.