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

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Alison Saar, Skin/Deep, 1993

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Alison Saar: This is Alison Saar. I'm the artist that created Skin/Deep in 1993.

Generally, I use ceiling tin or the pressed metal tin to clad my sculptures. It's always been a material that I saw as a skin. In this case, it has been flayed off of the figures. When I usually use it on figures, it also feels like an armor. The material itself being metal has a sort of protective quality. I think this piece in particular, where it has been taken off of the figure and nailed on to the wall, it talks about the vulnerability, and the vulnerability of skin at the same time.

When I made this piece, I think I was pregnant with my second child, and it became a point where I just couldn't watch the news. We had the Rodney King beatings. Then there was a young man from Brooklyn, Christopher Wilson, who had gone down to Tampa and had been abducted and doused with gasoline and set afire. It seemed every time I turned on the news, it was open season on black males. It was a frightening time, I think, having a son, and just seeing the way the world was responding to people of color.

That's what really got me doing these pieces. I think, in general, my work really wants to not only give dignity to the figures that I create, but also strength. I think that this is the first piece I've done that really was a straight out victim and vulnerable.

I think part of that was a really angry response, and actually a really frightened response to the news that was being broadcasted nightly on our television sets. Sadly, it's still as apropos twenty years later. I think it's interesting that now with access to public media, that a lot of these things that had been going on for [laughs] centuries, basically, are more visible.

Alison Saar created this sculpture that resembles a skinned animal pelt in the wake of African American motorist Rodney King’s beating by white Los Angeles police officers in 1991. Although Skin/Deep does not reference King directly, its splayed, vulnerable pose evokes a victim of brutality. Saar’s works incorporate found objects and folk-art materials, such as the nails and rusted-tin ceiling panels here, often in ways that lend them unexpected significance. This sculpture’s form, for example, also approximates a crucifix, implying that redemption can be found through suffering. In the artist’s words, she is seeking “constructive ways of facing tragic, painful experiences.”

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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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