Alice Neel's portraits at Victoria Miro capture the colourful personalities of New York

If you visited the Royal Academy’s recent America After The Fall: Painting in the 1930s exhibition and wanted more, there’s good news. Victoria Miro Gallery is holding an entire show devoted to Alice Neel, one of the artists featured.

Neel’s portrait of union organiser Pat Whalen was featured in the Royal Academy’s show, given five stars by our critic Matthew Collings. Victoria Miro’s show of Neel’s portraits is curated by acclaimed US critic Hilton Als, and focuses on the paintings she made in the five decades that she lived in Upper Manhattan until her death in 1984.

Als, who notes her fascination with “the breadth of humanity that she encountered’, brings together portraits she created of New York personalities, both famous and unknown.

In these works, she painted friends and neighbours as well as cultural figures and people connected with the civil rights movement.

Als argues that Neel broke away from the canon of Western art by painting only people who looked like her. By creating portraits of Latino, black and Asian people, “she was opening up portraiture to include those person who were not generally seen in its history.”

Alice Neel, Uptown, is at Victoria Miro until July 29; victoriamiro.com

Are you a budding artist? Enter the Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize in association with Hiscox and you could win £10,000. Visit standard.co.uk/artprize