Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

A painting of a living room with floating heads of activist figures and a scroll "in memory of. . ."

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

Floor 6

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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Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir IV, 1998

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Narrator: This large banner-like painting by Kerry James Marshall is part of a series called Souvenir, intended to commemorate important African American cultural figures of the 1960s.

Kerry James Marshall: Now, one of the things you’ll see in the paintings, is there’s a list, or roll call, of individuals. And in the painting here, Souvenir IV, at the Whitney Museum, the roll call is a list of musicians, and in this case, they’re all blues, jazz and R&B musicians.

Narrator: Across the top of the painting, in the cloud-like forms, are the faces of other musicians.

Kerry James Marshall: And in that pantheon of images there, you see people like Dinah Washington, you see Billie Holiday, you see John Coltrane, you see Wes Montgomery, Little Walter, and each one of those musicians in the pantheon across the top also speaks the name of another musician, so it’s a way to try to get as large a roll call as I could.

Narrator: Marshall included musicians who died between 1959 and 1970, the years bracketing the sixties.

Kerry James Marshall: 1959 was when Billie Holiday died and 1970 is when Jimi Hendrix died. And you can see in the bottom curl of the scroll floating in the middle of the living room, that J-I-M underneath that curl begins the name of Jimi Hendrix.

One of the things I wanted to do with the naming of all of these other people, who also died during the same period that the Kennedys and Martin Luther King died, was to expand the pantheon of people who were worthy of remembrance to include people who didn’t receive the same kind of popular commemoration that the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King did.

Narrator: Marshall sets this painting in a contemporary middle class interior, except that his protagonist, an elderly woman, has a pair of wings, like an angel.

Kerry James Marshall: And I think in a way, one of the things I was trying to suggest in the painting is that this is the world we live in. It’s ordinary and magical at the same time. And the thing is, at any moment we can recreate or call up visions of these people and relive a sense of the time through the power of what they produced.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to an excerpt of Dinah Washington singing This Bitter Earth.

Kerry James Marshall’s four-part Souvenir series memorializes political and cultural pioneers who died during the 1950s and 1960s. In Souvenir IV a tranquil domestic scene, rendered in gray scale to emphasize a sense of historicity, is interrupted by a glittery overlay. Floating above the African American woman, herself adorned with silver wings, are the heads of blues, jazz, and R&B musicians, including John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. Suspended angel-like amid clouds and stars, each speaks the name of another musical legend while still other names appear on a scroll, a roll call of the lost.

“More than anything people just want stars,” Andy Warhol once remarked. In Myths he depicts Superman, the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz, and other heroes and villains of American culture (including, on the far right, himself). Silver paint alludes to the “silver screen,” and the vertical rows of mechanically reproduced head shots suggest filmstrips or contact sheets, the sources feeding our obsession with celebrity. Yet Warhol’s title is more complex: “myths” could refer to the “mythic” status of movie stars but it also connotes falseness, the distortion of truth, and the fleeting nature of fame.

To make Lyle, Chuck Close took a large-format Polaroid photograph of fellow artist Lyle Ashton Harris. Then he applied a diagonally oriented penciled grid to the image, dividing it into small diamond-shaped units. Close transposed the photograph onto a canvas overlaid with a larger but otherwise identical grid, painting every diamond individually. Viewed up close, each diamond looks like a small abstract painting of multicolored and irregular concentric rings. From a distance, however, the colors, shapes, and lines coalesce into a depiction of Harris. Close began painting large-scale heads in the late 1960s, at a time when figuration was out of step with the then-dominant interest in abstraction. In fact, he recounted that “the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of possible things you could do was to make a portrait." Close embraced the freedom for innovation that came with working in an unpopular genre, and for nearly five decades he has demonstrated new possibilities for conveying a sitter’s likeness.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2008

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Narrator: A woman glances over her shoulder, framed by signs of luxury: elaborate jewelry, a hint of a ball gown, and a palatial formal garden. Her gaze is rather haughty, but also seems to hint at something else—perhaps dissatisfaction or bitterness. At the very least, her face betrays a struggle with her advancing age. Her mouth is pinched and wrinkled, while her forehead seems almost too smooth, and her hair unnaturally dark.

This photograph comes from a series of society portraits by Cindy Sherman. To make these images, Sherman transformed her own appearance using wigs, thick pancake makeup, and costumes. She photographed herself against a green screen, and then Photoshopped her images into opulent backgrounds. The resulting characters seem artificial, and at odds with their surroundings.

Sherman made her society portraits in 2008, when the real estate bubble had hit its peak and the economy was on the verge of collapse. The works suggest an age of excess, a status-obsessed society. This image seems, in part, to critique that society—even to mock its members, cruelly exposing their flaws. At the same time, though, there is something tragic about the work, as if the woman were caught in a trap that is largely self-imposed.

This untitled work is one of a suite of large-scale photographs in which Cindy Sherman masquerades as an assortment of dowagers and aging socialites. The bejeweled and heavily made-up subject poses in front of the Belvedere Steps in Central Park as if about to ascend the staircase to attend a party or charity event. Her world-weary expression reveals the years that her makeup, strapless gown, and dyed hair attempt to mask. Like all of Sherman’s photographs that feature the artist in various guises, this work critically examines the conditions under which contemporary femininity is constructed, represented, and perceived.

In this untitled work, a stylized, blocky female figure examines a strip of celluloid, contemplating the scene that unfolds before her. Two of the cells are magnified and projected into space, revealing a seated figure with arms outstretched above her head. The painting draws on Avery Singer’s memories of watching her father work as a projectionist at the Museum of Modern Art and on her own student experiments with Super 8 filmmaking. Singer uses Google SketchUp, three dimensional computer modeling freeware, to construct the scenes and then translates the digital images to canvas using an airbrush paint application. The resulting image simultaneously suggests twentieth-century avantgarde art and design and early computer graphics. Reconciling these distinct reference points in her work, Singer has explained that “the aesthetics of the avantgarde have been so thoroughly digested by the culture industry that this style, while recalling very specific artistic movements, might also closely resemble a virtual reality space or even a cartoon.”

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View 382 works

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

SKIN/DEEP, 1993

SOUVENIR IV, 1998

MYTHS, 1981

LYLE, 1999

UNTITLED, 2008

UNTITLED, 2015

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Entry Gallery, Floor 6

SKIN/DEEP, 1993

SOUVENIR IV, 1998

MYTHS, 1981

LYLE, 1999

UNTITLED, 2008

UNTITLED, 2015

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection