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The National Portrait Gallery presents at the Americas Society Portraiture Now: Staging the Self, one in a series of exhibitions that showcase some of the most creative twenty-first-century portrait artists.
Portraiture Now: Staging the Self features the work of six contemporary U.S. Latino artists—David Antonio Cruz, Carlee Fernandez, María Martínez-Cañas, Rachelle Mozman, Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, and Michael Vasquez—who present identities theatrically, in order to rid portraiture of its reassuring tradition that fixes a person in space and time.
Through their works these artists address personal or family issues, telling stories that they remember or imagine from their past, manipulating images of themselves, or superimposing portraits of their loved ones on their own. Like actors searching for a character, they explore the boundaries of individuality. In the process, portraiture loses its aura of certainty and instead becomes an evolving map for finding oneself and others.
Image: Bear Hair Study (detail) by Carlee Fernandez, C-print, 2004. Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles. © Carlee Fernandez
Americas Society
680 Park Ave
New York
10065
United States
