The Outwin 2016: A Conversation
I’m always thinking about what makes a portrait work, especially right now. Every three years I direct the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, and I dive deep into the philosophical questions that it raises: how are artists who live and work in the United States defining portraiture in a global, contemporary context? Has the definition of portraiture shifted in the last three years?
As part of this process, I invited four external jurors to think about portraiture with me and the museum’s chief curator, Brandon Fortune. Dawoud Bey, professor of art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College in Chicago; Helen Molesworth, chief curator at LA MOCA; Jerry Saltz, senior critic at New York magazine, and John Valadez, a Los Angeles–based painter, debated and discussed portraiture for two intensive days. We ultimately selected 43 artists out of 2,500 entrants to be included in “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today.”
Concerns that animated our jury discussions included the relationship between the artist and subject and what that encounter tells us about both of them. We also considered to what extent the artist conveyed the presence of a living individual, to the point where the artwork exists as an emotional and psychological experience rather than as an object. For me, the stories that the selected works tell and the conversations that the works stimulate—either in the exhibition itself, in an artist’s studio, or elsewhere—are key to the dynamic of this exhibition. The 43 artists in “The Outwin 2016” remind us of the connections that bind us a human beings, as a community, and as a nation.
