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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In the 1960s, Andy Warhol began to crack the glossy veneer of celebrity culture in portraits of figures like Jackie Kennedy, whose glamour was intertwined with pathos and fragility. Warhol evoked mass media’s transformation of the individual into a consumable icon, a path followed more recently by Anne Collier, Elizabeth Peyton, and Richard Prince. Many of the works in this gallery examine the fantasy of stardom and expose its darker side—the flashbulb’s glare, the menacing intrusions of paparazzi, and the voracious appetites of audiences raised on a diet of pop culture and political disillusionment. Others explore how the glut of media imagery leads ordinary people to internalize the rituals of glamour and fandom by appropriating everything from costumes and makeup to the artificial poses of film stills and headshots. These works may be seen as confirming the insidious influence of the mass-media machine or may point to the liberating possibilities of casting oneself as a star.

Below is a selection of works from Price of Fame.

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A work by Martha Rosler. First Lady Pat Nixon is posed in an interior of the White House. A harrowing image of a figure in agony is collaged over the mantle behind her.

This photograph is part of Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, which addressed the disconnect between American middle-class aspirations and the war in Vietnam. Most of the works in the series integrate graphic images of the conflict into tranquil domestic interiors. Here, however, Rosler features First Lady Pat Nixon in her 1969 Inaugural Ball dress in the White House’s Yellow Oval Room. Behind her, in lieu of a painting, hangs a still from the bloody conclusion of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, which was inspired by the same violent media images from Vietnam. Nixon’s gracious smile stands in sharp contrast to actress Faye Dunaway’s anguished expression as she is pummeled by bullets.

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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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