In February 1998, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als published a provocative profile of the great American writer James Baldwin in The New Yorker. Every few years since, Als has returned to Baldwin on the page and in art to reveal that there was not one Baldwin but Baldwins — political philosopher, international flâneur, screenwriter. Amid the intense contemporary interest in Baldwin’s life and legacy comes Als’s latest exhibition, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” now on view at David Zwirner Gallery. In it, Als has curated what he calls “a composite” sketch of the celebrated novelist and essayist with video, photography and painting by artists including Ja’tovia Gary, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Alice Neel, Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon.

Divided into two parts — “A Walker in the City” and “Colonialism” — the show visualizes aspects of the literature that took Baldwin from a Harlem boy preacher to a lion of letters who disabused America of the notion that it was living its ideals. It tackles his resulting isolation, balancing heavily discussed themes in his writing like race with threads “still not explored in contemporary literature as a possibility,” says Als, such as the fact “that there can be black men who love one another.” But it’s Baldwin’s penchant for art that carries the show: A 1941 nude, titled “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin),” is an oil portrait of the writer at age 15 made by his friend, the gay Modernist painter Beauford Delaney. That work is on view alongside ephemera, such as Baldwin’s personal letters and pencil drawings, that Als describes as “new treasures.” They show that Baldwin knew, and knew how to render in more than just words, the often overpowering dynamic of desire. “I think that this show,” notes Als, “is a way of giving him just due as a significant queer artist.”

Through Feb. 16 at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York, davidzwirner.com — ANTWAUN SARGENT

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