Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

A black and white photograph by Dawoud Bey. Two young African American boys wear scout uniforms, with somber faces.
A black and white photograph by Dawoud Bey. Two young African American boys wear scout uniforms, with somber faces.

Dawoud Bey, Two Explorer Scouts, Brooklyn, New York, 1988 (printed 1999). Gelatin silver print, sheet: 23 7/8 × 20 in. (60.6 × 50.8 cm), image: 22 1/16 × 18 3/16 in. (56 × 46.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur and Susan Fleischer  2012.194 © Dawoud Bey

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand.

Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition, which was championed by its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual. Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness—portraiture’s usual objective—within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether. Some revel in the genre’s glamorous allure, while others critique its elitist associations and instead call attention to the banal or even the grotesque.

Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Readily reproducible and ever-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is curated by Dana Miller, Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Permanent Collection and Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator with Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; and Sasha Nicholas, consulting curator.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is sponsored by

Delta

Max Mara

Major support is provided by Anne Cox Chambers and Helen and Charles Schwab.

Generous support is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.

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Entry Gallery, Floor 7

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Selected works from the seventh-floor entry gallery appear in this section.

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HUEY NEWTON, 2007

A Black man wearing a black beret, suit jacket, and slacks sits in a peacock chair. The back of his chair is various shades of grey and features glimpses of newspaper clippings throughout. He holds a spear in his left hand and a rifle in the other. The floor is rust colored with an irregularly shaped zebra print rug. The wall behind him is off-white with rust colored intersecting lines.
A Black man wearing a black beret, suit jacket, and slacks sits in a peacock chair. The back of his chair is various shades of grey and features glimpses of newspaper clippings throughout. He holds a spear in his left hand and a rifle in the other. The floor is rust colored with an irregularly shaped zebra print rug. The wall behind him is off-white with rust colored intersecting lines.

Henry Taylor (b. 1958), Huey Newton, 2007. Acrylic and collaged photocopies on canvas, 94 9/16 × 76 1/4 in. (240.2 × 193.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg in honor of Adam D. Weinberg 2016.86. © Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor’s subjects range from family and friends to preeminent African American figures. The artist based this painting on historical material, a 1967 photograph of Huey P. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The source image first appeared in the Party’s newspaper, which disseminated the group’s call for a more militant response in the face of discrimination against black Americans than the nonviolent civil rights movement advocated.

Taylor’s composition includes collaged text fragments from news reports of the 2006 death of Sean Bell. Bell was an African American man who was shot and was fatally shot the eve of his wedding by plainclothes detectives in Queens, New York. Taylor’s reference to this incident—which sparked a public outcry that grew louder after all of the officers involved were acquitted of any crime—links the activist movement of the late 1960s with current patterns of police violence toward men of color.

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A black and white photograph by Dawoud Bey. Two young African American boys wear scout uniforms, with somber faces.
A black and white photograph by Dawoud Bey. Two young African American boys wear scout uniforms, with somber faces.

Dawoud Bey, Two Explorer Scouts, Brooklyn, New York, 1988 (printed 1999). Gelatin silver print, sheet: 23 7/8 × 20 in. (60.6 × 50.8 cm), image: 22 1/16 × 18 3/16 in. (56 × 46.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Arthur and Susan Fleischer  2012.194 © Dawoud Bey

This audio guide highlights selected works in Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection, with commentary by students from PS 33 Chelsea Prep and Whitney Museum educator Melanie Adsit.

View guide

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 381 works

In the News

“Astutely geared to the selfie age, it might well have been subtitled 'Americans Are Strange to Look At,' which, in the two-hundred and fifty images here, we sure are: funny-strange, beautiful-strange, crazy-strange, dangerous-strange, inscrutable-strange.”
—The New York Times

“In Conversation: Barkley L. Hendricks with Laila Pedro”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“This 8-Foot Candle Portrait Mesmerized Me”
—New York Magazine

"The Whitney's Extraordinary Human Interest Exhibit is the Ultimate Portrait Show"
—NJ.com

"The mixed media show, grouped by era or thematically, includes a variety of perspectives that challenge who we are and how we perceive and record those around us"
—Blouin Art Info


“A collection that proves that more than just the faces of people can constitute portraits.”
—Chelsea News

"[Human Interest] delves into the art form in an unprecedented way."
—InStyle

"The Whitney Museum’s wide-angle collection show Human Interest reminds us that the democratization of portraiture started more than a century ago, and encourages us to think more broadly about what is or isn’t a portrait."
—Artspace 

"There are magnetic images everywhere."
—The New York Times

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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