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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Institutional Complex

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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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T.J. SOLOMON, JR., 2001

Robert Beck (b. 1959), T.J. Solomon, Jr., 2001, from the portfolio Thirteen Shooters. Inkjet print, sheet: 50 3/4 × 42 in. (128.9 × 106.7 cm); image: 49 13/16 × 40 1/16 in. (126.5 × 101.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gifts of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner. P.2011.44.2 © Robert Beck; courtesy CRG Gallery, New York

Robert Beck’s Thirteen Shooterspresents portraits of thirteen adolescent boys, all of whom carried out mass shootings at schools between 1996 and 2001. The thirteen images on view in the exhibition comprise professional headshots, yearbook portraits, snapshots of an arrest, mug shots, and courtroom photographs—all taken from the mass media and bearing the copyright of the journalistic source. In re-presenting these images, the artist critiques the conventional narrative constructed and uniformly applied by the media in reporting such stories—the transformation from innocent child to social outcast to violent criminal. The shooters referenced in the portfolio’s title could apply to the photographers as well as to their subjects. Beck’s selection of thirteen portraits ties the work directly to Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men, a mural made for the 1964 World’s Fair, which depicted the mug shots of New York’s most wanted criminals of 1962.

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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.

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Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

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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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