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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Annette Lemieux’s Left Right Left Rightconsists of thirty photographs of raised fists—ten different images, each printed three times—nailed to wooden poles like poster placards. Some of the fists belong to famous political and cultural figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, and Jane Fonda. Others are anonymous: the fist of a sailor, a preacher, a concertgoer at Woodstock. Together they suggest the united front of a political demonstration whose cause remains unspecified. Taken out of context, the individual fists could be raised in celebration, anger, or solidarity.

Following the recent presidential election, Lemieux requested that Left Right Left Right be reinstalled upside down. Lemieux’s gesture suggests a commitment to individual agency, the continuing power of protest, and a feeling, in her words, that the “world has turned upside down.”

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

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LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT, 1995

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On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

14

LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT, 1995

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection