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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Robert Beck’s Thirteen Shooterspresents portraits of thirteen adolescent boys, all of whom carried out mass shootings at schools between 1996 and 2001. The thirteen images on view in the exhibition comprise professional headshots, yearbook portraits, snapshots of an arrest, mug shots, and courtroom photographs—all taken from the mass media and bearing the copyright of the journalistic source. In re-presenting these images, the artist critiques the conventional narrative constructed and uniformly applied by the media in reporting such stories—the transformation from innocent child to social outcast to violent criminal. The shooters referenced in the portfolio’s title could apply to the photographers as well as to their subjects. Beck’s selection of thirteen portraits ties the work directly to Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men, a mural made for the 1964 World’s Fair, which depicted the mug shots of New York’s most wanted criminals of 1962.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

14

T.J. SOLOMON, JR., 2001

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

14

T.J. SOLOMON, JR., 2001

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection