National Portrait Gallery

As is often the case, our museum seminar series ended with a trip to the National Portrait Gallery. As is always the case, it was a spectacular afternoon. The focus of the day was the current exhibit,  Eye to I: Self – Portraiture as an Exploration of Identity,  which examines how more than 75 American artists have portrayed themselves through drawing, painting, print, photograph, sculpture and mixed media. The exhibit allows the visitor to consider the significance of self-portraiture in the context of the history and culture of the United States, and as such, was a perfect way to continue examination our 2019 theme, The Search for an American Identity: Building a Nation Together.

Our tour of the exhibit was led by Wendy Wick Reaves, Curator Emerita of Prints and Drawings at the museum, whose 40 plus years of knowledge and experience provided the Fellows with rich commentary and helped them examine portraiture from a new perspective. She reminded the group  that a self-portrait allows  the viewer to meet an artist directly, allowing for a different experience than a portrait created by another person. By suggesting that self-portraits are a form of performance, where the artist is director, composer, and actor choosing what to reveal and what to conceal, Fellows immediately began to notice things they might have overlooked . The group was charged to consider all of  the small and large decisions that go into a self-portrait, such as  color, form, light, objects included,  clothing choices, and scale.

Later in the afternoon, Briana Zavadil White led the group in a ” portrait reading” exercise, focused on Internet Cache Self  Portrait by Evan Roth, an intriguing piece that generated much discussion. Fellows left with a folder of resources she provided, and lots of ideas about using portraits as ways to examine identity. Once again, it was an energized group of Fellows leaving the National Portrait Gallery at the end of the afternoon, and a perfect end to the museum seminar series portion of the Fellowship.