Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Body Bared

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The nude is one of the most time-honored subjects in Western art, but for centuries it was used to depict unnamed generic figures or mythological subjects rather than specific individuals. Since the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists have increasingly challenged this convention by producing frank, highly particular nudes, often with the sitters identified in the works’ titles. From Joan Semmel’s monumental self-portrait in bed with a lover to John Coplans’s unflinching document of his aging body, most of these works subvert expectations about how a nude should look, pose, and engage the viewer. Photographs by Katy Grannan, and Catherine Opie, among others, unabashedly question cultural assumptions about gender, beauty, and power, giving voice to groups and individuals who are often marginalized by both the traditions of portraiture and mainstream American culture. By transforming nudity from a classical ideal into something decidedly personal, contemporary, and idiosyncratic, these artists compel us to confront the complex and often contradictory feelings elicited by the human body: fascination and repulsion, pleasure and shame, freedom and inhibition.


Below is a selection of works from Body Bared.

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THE GARDEN, GEMENA, DR CONGO, 2015

Deana Lawson, The Garden, Gemena, DR Congo, 2015

In Human Interest

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Deana Lawson, The Garden, Gemena, DR Congo, 2015

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Deana Lawson: I’m Deana Lawson. I’m a photo-based artist. This image is taken in D.R. Congo; it’s in a small town called Gemena.

We often think of countries in Africa, especially D.R. Congo as a site of crisis or a problematic place. I was interested in switching that dynamic. Instead of seeing it in terms of a place of crisis I wanted to imagine it as a paradise or Eden. Robert Farris Thompson talks about Congo being the center of the mother continent, almost like the veins coming out of Congo. The center of humanity, in general. And my idea with The Garden was that the subjects would pose as the first human beings on earth.

Narrator: Lawson modeled their poses after the images of Adam and Eve in Hieronymous Bosch’s sixteenth-century painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Deana Lawson: I found the female subject, who worked at a local restaurant in Gemena, and the male subject was my taxi driver. So they’re not a real couple, but it’s completely staged to look as though they’re a couple.

The male subject has his hand on her belly. Often people ask if she’s pregnant; she’s not pregnant, but I don’t mind that being a possibility of the imagination.

I’m really looking at these two individuals and trying to imagine or put out an image in the world that represents a divine intimacy, which I think is needed right now, particularly when so many of popular culture images and media put forth a divisiveness, a lot of times, between black men and black women. So to me this is about asserting this, somewhat of a love story.

This work is one among Deana Lawson’s larger project of documenting global black cultures through portraits. She began the project over a decade ago in her Brooklyn neighborhood; more recently, it has taken her to Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and other countries. To make this photograph, the artist traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation rich in cultural history and natural resources, but one with a deeply troubled colonial and postcolonial past. Lawson hired locals she met in the town of Gemena to pose as though they were the first humans, modeling them after an image of Adam and Eve that appears in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–15). Lawson is purposefully working against conventional Western depictions of such biblical narratives. She explained the recuperative nature of her approach: “This image to me is reclaiming that power [of the Congo], the power of family and relationships, and of the black body.”

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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