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artists & participants
Eleanor Antin,
Richard Avedon,
Alvin Baltrop,
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Robert Beck,
George Bellows,
Billy Al Bengston,
Forrest Bess,
Dawoud Bey,
Ashley Bickerton,
Ilse Bing,
Paul Cadmus,
Alexander Calder,
Chuck Close,
John Coplans,
Louise Dahl-Wolfe,
Willem De Kooning,
Jay DeFeo,
Beauford Delaney,
Charles Demuth,
Philip-Lorca diCorcia,
Rosalyn Drexler,
Walker Evans,
Robert Frank,
Arshile Gorky,
Scott Grieger,
Nancy Grossman,
Susan Hall,
Lyle Ashton Harris,
Rachel Harrison,
Marsden Hartley,
David Hartt,
Barkley L. Hendricks,
Lewis Hine,
Edward Hopper,
Douglas Huebler,
Peter Hujar,
Jasper Johns,
K8 Hardy,
Howard Kanovitz,
Mike Kelley,
Mary Kelly,
Karen Kilimnik,
Byron Kim,
Walt Kuhn,
Louise Lawler,
Deana Lawson,
Arthur Lee,
Annette Lemieux,
Alfred Leslie,
Glenn Ligon,
Kalup Linzy,
Robert Longo,
Sally Mann,
Robert Mapplethorpe,
Paul McCarthy,
Ryan McGinley,
Susan Meiselas,
Toyo Miyatake,
Gerald Murphy,
Wangechi Mutu,
Bruce Nauman,
Alice Neel,
Louise Nevelson,
Arnold Newman,
Dorothy Norman,
Catherine Opie,
Georgia O´Keeffe,
Elizabeth Peyton,
Fairfield Porter,
Yvonne Rainer,
Larry Rivers,
Ed Ruscha,
Jacolby Satterwhite,
Joan Semmel,
Cindy Sherman,
Laurie Simmons,
Gary Simmons,
Avery Singer,
Raphael Soyer,
Florine Stettheimer,
Rudolf Stingel,
Sturtevant,
Henry Taylor,
Stewart Uoo,
Carl van Vechten,
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney,
Weegee,
James Welling,
John Wilde,
Hannah Wilke,
Andrea Zittel
curators
press release
Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand.
Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition, which was championed by its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual. Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness—portraiture’s usual objective—within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether. Some revel in the genre’s glamorous allure, while others critique its elitist associations and instead call attention to the banal or even the grotesque.
Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Readily reproducible and ever-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.
Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is curated by Dana Miller, Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Permanent Collection and Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator with Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; and Sasha Nicholas, consulting curator.