Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Whether in the form of passport photographs, ID badges, or mug shots, portraits play a central role in society’s efforts to classify individuals and regulate their behavior. Against the backdrop of the social upheavals of the early 1990s—including the economic downturn, heightened racial tensions, and the culture wars—artists seized on such images to ask pointed questions about how academic, legal, civic, and other institutional structures shape our perceptions of others and ourselves. By drawing on the formulas of the police lineup and the mug shot, for example, Gary Simmons and Glenn Ligon both underscore and bristle against the representational conventions and stereotypes that associate black men with violence. Other artists inject oblique personal statements into indifferent systems of order. Byron Kim transforms the modernist touchstones of the grid and the monochrome from abstractions into veiled portraits, while Andrea Zittel conjures a generic self by distilling the necessities of life into a few basic functions.

Below is a selection of works from Institutional Complex.

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For the series Cost of Living, Josh Kline interviewed janitors and then used a digital camera to photograph the body parts and supplies used to complete their tasks. He edited the images in a computer-aided design program, and the resulting assemblage elements were created on a 3-D printer. In this case he spoke with Aleyda, a housekeeper at the Hotel on Rivington, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Kline’s sculptures call attention to an often invisible labor force and remind us that workers’ humanity is sometimes valued less than the tools used to complete their jobs. They reflect, in his words, “the relentless push to squeeze more productivity out of workers—turning people into reliable, always-on office appliances.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

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COST OF LIVING (ALEYDA), 2014

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

14

COST OF LIVING (ALEYDA), 2014

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection