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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Body Bared

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The nude is one of the most time-honored subjects in Western art, but for centuries it was used to depict unnamed generic figures or mythological subjects rather than specific individuals. Since the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists have increasingly challenged this convention by producing frank, highly particular nudes, often with the sitters identified in the works’ titles. From Joan Semmel’s monumental self-portrait in bed with a lover to John Coplans’s unflinching document of his aging body, most of these works subvert expectations about how a nude should look, pose, and engage the viewer. Photographs by Katy Grannan, and Catherine Opie, among others, unabashedly question cultural assumptions about gender, beauty, and power, giving voice to groups and individuals who are often marginalized by both the traditions of portraiture and mainstream American culture. By transforming nudity from a classical ideal into something decidedly personal, contemporary, and idiosyncratic, these artists compel us to confront the complex and often contradictory feelings elicited by the human body: fascination and repulsion, pleasure and shame, freedom and inhibition.


Below is a selection of works from Body Bared.

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THE GARDEN, GEMENA, DR CONGO, 2015

Deana Lawson, The Garden, Gemena, DR Congo, 2015

In Human Interest

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Deana Lawson, The Garden, Gemena, DR Congo, 2015

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Deana Lawson: I’m Deana Lawson. I’m a photo-based artist. This image is taken in D.R. Congo; it’s in a small town called Gemena.

We often think of countries in Africa, especially D.R. Congo as a site of crisis or a problematic place. I was interested in switching that dynamic. Instead of seeing it in terms of a place of crisis I wanted to imagine it as a paradise or Eden. Robert Farris Thompson talks about Congo being the center of the mother continent, almost like the veins coming out of Congo. The center of humanity, in general. And my idea with The Garden was that the subjects would pose as the first human beings on earth.

Narrator: Lawson modeled their poses after the images of Adam and Eve in Hieronymous Bosch’s sixteenth-century painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Deana Lawson: I found the female subject, who worked at a local restaurant in Gemena, and the male subject was my taxi driver. So they’re not a real couple, but it’s completely staged to look as though they’re a couple.

The male subject has his hand on her belly. Often people ask if she’s pregnant; she’s not pregnant, but I don’t mind that being a possibility of the imagination.

I’m really looking at these two individuals and trying to imagine or put out an image in the world that represents a divine intimacy, which I think is needed right now, particularly when so many of popular culture images and media put forth a divisiveness, a lot of times, between black men and black women. So to me this is about asserting this, somewhat of a love story.

This work is one among Deana Lawson’s larger project of documenting global black cultures through portraits. She began the project over a decade ago in her Brooklyn neighborhood; more recently, it has taken her to Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and other countries. To make this photograph, the artist traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation rich in cultural history and natural resources, but one with a deeply troubled colonial and postcolonial past. Lawson hired locals she met in the town of Gemena to pose as though they were the first humans, modeling them after an image of Adam and Eve that appears in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–15). Lawson is purposefully working against conventional Western depictions of such biblical narratives. She explained the recuperative nature of her approach: “This image to me is reclaiming that power [of the Congo], the power of family and relationships, and of the black body.”

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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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