Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Since the 1970s, artists have increasingly used self-portraiture to explore multiple invented personas as well as darker psychological states. Searching for their own place in a society that prizes youth, fame, and self-exposure, many have adopted strategies from popular culture but often with a twist. Kalup Linzy stars in an imaginary soap opera about the art world, while Jean-Michel Basquiat places himself and his friends along the troubled continuum of African American performers in Hollywood. Other artists confound the air of heroism traditionally associated with the artist’s image, casting themselves as antiheroes shrouded in anxiety and self-doubt. Charles Ray turns himself into the diminutive prisoner of his own art, and Rudolf Stingel depicts himself on a grand scale overcome by melancholy and inertia. In a culture in which the fashion industry, cosmetic surgery, and digital editing have made physical appearance more malleable, the artists whose work is featured in this section testify to a widespread sense of uncertainty in the self and how it might be portrayed.

Below is a selection of works from Self-Conscious.

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Woman in Hijab with arabic written on her face and body.

Shirin Neshat came to the United States in 1974 as a student but was unable to return to her native Iran until 1990 due to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the subsequent war between Iraq and Iran. When she eventually did, Neshat was shocked and fascinated by the country’s radical transformation under the conservative religious government. In Unveiling, a self-portrait, the artist wears a chador—a type of veil worn by Iranian women while in a public space—and her face and chest are inscribed with lines of text by the feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad. With this work and others from this period, Neshat considers how “in Islam a woman’s body has been historically a . . . battleground for various kinds of rhetoric and political ideology.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Self-Conscious

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UNVEILING (WOMAN OF ALLAH SERIES), 1993

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Self-Conscious

13

UNVEILING (WOMAN OF ALLAH SERIES), 1993

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection