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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A collage of a woman sitting at a table next to a collage of an empty table with portraits on the wall in the background.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s diptych is layered with portraits, most prominently the artist’s self-portrait at left. The scene is an invented domestic space that fuses details of Akunyili Crosby’s Nigerian upbringing with those from her life in the United States, where she has lived since 1999. On the right-hand side are framed pictures of multiple generations of her family—the artist’s parents, her in-laws, her grandmother, and her own wedding. Commemorative portrait fabric—a customized material often made for special events in Nigeria, in this case the artist’s mother’s senate campaign—functions as part of the architectural backdrop of the diptych.

Akunyili Crosby’s work routinely combines elements drawn from postcolonial Nigeria and the United States, pop culture, and family life in this way. As she explains, “I want to put the viewer in this space of confluence, of multiple things. . . . It is this space where disparate elements come together, and the new space that comes out isn’t just this plus this—it’s like a whole new identity.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Self-Conscious

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PORTALS, 2016

Artists

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Self-Conscious

13

PORTALS, 2016

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection