Girls’ School marked a turning point in my work—from using myself as a subject to painting others, and from conceptual strategies to the slower medium of paint.

Becoming a mother complicated my identity as an artist. As my children entered social worlds far removed from the downtown art scene I knew, I struggled to reconcile these two lives. My daughter’s private girls’ school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side offered an unexpected glimpse into the rarefied world of Park Avenue privilege. The girls reminded me of the young women in Sargent’s portraits, inspiring paintings of uniformed students in domestic tableaux, poised between childhood and adulthood.

Through these paintings, I hoped to convey my ambivalence while exploring a question central to my work: how is identity constructed, and by whom.