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.

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

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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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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Catherine Opie, Ron Athey, 1994

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Narrator: Catherine Opie took this photograph of the performance artist Ron Athey in 1994.

Catherine Opie: He's just a very incredibly amazing, giving, lovely person who has pushed the boundaries with his own body.

Narrator: This photograph came from a time when Opie had just started making studio portraits of her friends in the San Francisco leather community. She used brightly colored backdrops intended to recall the northern Renaissance painter Hans Holbein, who is known for the intense humanism of his portraits. Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie: By using bright colored backgrounds, I was able to reference Hans Holbein as a painter and begin to create these very loving, political portraits at a time in which my community was decimated by AIDS, and really wanted to talk about the idea of identity politics in relationship to being an out queer person. I wanted to kind of redefine the notion of my own documentary practice, so that the site became the body.

Catherine Opie’s large-format photograph features her friend, Ron Athey, a queer performance artist known for pushing the physical limits of his own and fellow performers’ bodies during live events. Opie, who has participated in some of Athey’s works, made this image to celebrate what she has described as his commitment to “transforming his body for himself and art.” Opie first gained attention in the early 1990s for her portraits of transgender women and men, drag queens, and others who fall outside traditionally assigned gender roles. Her approach is documentary but also personal: “I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity,” she has explained. Opie acknowledges that some of her subjects, particularly those who participate in such body modification as tattooing and piercing, are “always going to be stared at.” Her aim is “to make the portraits stare back.”

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Audio guides

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.

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