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"The idea of self-portraiture for me is about embodiment and what it means to reimagine the self as a way of looking at the past, to deal with the present as ways to think about the future." - Lyle Ashton Harris
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"I think the portraits are a way for me to study my identity, or my own understanding of identity." - Robert Pruitt
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“I returned to portraiture because I wanted to do works that speak to people’s souls and spirits, which is what we really need now with the times we are living in." - Richard Wyatt Jr.
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"When dealing with portraits you’re trying to capture the soul of the person you’re drawing, at least that’s what I do — hopefully trying to execute that type of feeling and emotion." - Timothy Washington
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"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Portraiture: A Private Room has been conceived of from home — the site of intimate gestures, reflection, and deep concentration. Included are recent portraits by Luis Flores, Katy Grannan, Meleko Mokgosi, Robert Pruitt and Richard Wyatt Jr. accompanied by vintage works by Lyle Ashton Harris and Timothy Washington.
Through solitude and precarity, this is both a time of introspection and community — a moment we might reconnect. The nature of portraiture is tied to a contemplative and reflective mindset, one where the artist must examine the subject and themselves forensically. Portrait-making offers a process of slowing down, exploration, and delving into those beautiful, often complicated details that make up a person.
This process is ever-present in the exceptionally detailed drawings of Richard Wyatt Jr., whose work we are proud to introduce. For Wyatt, meditative mark-making is an element inseparable from his work. Timothy Washington's figures emerge through a subtractive process of removing pigment fixed atop metal surfaces. Lyle Ashton Harris and Luis Flores examine their own identities while inhabiting others. Katy Grannan's new portraits take us to the Blackfeet Nation, where family members and the extended tribe remember those who have disappeared. Meleko Mokgosi and Robert Pruitt dive into the personal histories and objects that comprise a life. Together these works offer a small insight into our collective humanity and provide a moment to pause, breathe, and hope.
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Lyle Ashton Harris
b. 1965Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Portraiture is a tool Harris uses to question, declare, and provoke — together calling attention to the construction of image and selfhood while underscoring the life of his subjects. This selection presents a broad range of Harris’s works including Coquette, 1987-1988 and Maine #1, 1987-1988 which are part of his seminal series Americas and Reflection of Past Life through Glass, Zamble at Land's End #2, 2018, where Harris returns to self-portraiture in his Flash of the Spirit series, and Harris’s unique polaroid Billie #1, 2002, which depicts the artist in drag dressed as Billie Holiday in handcuffs.
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Meleko Mokgosi
b. 1981Meleko Mokgosi is a painter born in Francistown, Botswana working with the competing narratives of southern African and colonial histories. In high school, Mokgosi was introduced to German Expressionist painters such as Max Beckman and Otto Dix whose work demonstrated for him the potential of painting as a platform for communicating political themes. Mokgosi's practice requires intellectual and emotional investment as he engages with history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history. Throughout his work, he poses the significant question: "Is it possible for a black body to function within an allegorical framework, as opposed to already being taken over by the idea of blackness, which really collapses any kind of reading?"
Mokgosi paints large-scale canvases in a style reminiscent of European history painting; panoramas allow him to subvert colonial-era narratives and use the language of a grand European tradition to tell the broad story of postcolonial southern Africa. The paintings by Mokgosi presented in our online exhibition come from two distinct chapters of his body of work Democratic Intuition (2013-2019), an 8 chapter project of oil on canvas paintings and sculptures, through which Mokgosi approaches ideas of the democratic in relation to the lived experiences of the subjects that occupy southern Africa. -
Robert Pruitt
B. 1975Robert Pruitt works in a variety of materials, with the focus of his practice centered on rendering large scale figurative portraits. He projects into those images a juxtaposing series of experiences and material references, denoting a diverse and radical black past, present, and future. Pruitt often utilizes religion, spirituality, signs, and symbolic objects throughout his work as a means of exploring an African-American conception of transcendence and mythology.
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Richard Wyatt Jr.
B. 1955Richard Wyatt Jr. is best known for his work that often revolves around themes such as layered history, social archaeology, and culture. Wyatt has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout his career, most recently in the 2019 exhibition Life Model: Charles White and His Students at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Wyatt's true passion is drawing and the act of mark-making. Throughout his career, Wyatt has always come back to his intricately-detailed portraits for which he is well known. Making these drawings is a meticulous, labor intensive process that requires Wyatt to slow down and contemplate every detail. For him, working on his drawings from day to day, and the meditative mindset that they require, is as important as their content.
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Katy Grannan
b. 1969Katy Grannan, originally from Arlington, MA, discovered a passion for photography early in life, after her grandmother gave her a Kodak Instamatic 124. She never aspired to be an artist until she discovered Robert Frank and his indelible photographs in The Americans. This work changed her life. Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements.
Katy Grannan's new portraits take us to the Blackfeet Nation, where family members and the extended tribe remember those who have disappeared. Here, she attempts to picture what cannot be seen — absence, injustice and loss, and the enduring legacies of countless missing women. Katy Grannan's new series of portraits of Blackfeet women are part of an ongoing collaboration with the tribe to produce a series of photographs, films and individual recordings. Countless Natives have disappeared within vast and remote reservations in the United States and Canada. Exact numbers are unknown because there are no reliable statistics. No one is counting the missing.
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Timothy Washington
B. 1946Timothy Washington is a master draftsman who developed his own unique style of rendering from his appreciation of printmaking plates. In the catalogue for Three Graphic Artists, Washington's 1971 exhibition with Charles White and David Hammons at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Washington recalls, "When I had an etching class the plate seemed much more fascinating than the print itself. And I wondered about boundaries in art. Why should the plate be considered something to use to make a paper print when I loved the plate so much more? The plate said so much more to me because it had me with it." Since then, Washington has developed a unique process of scraping away black paint on metal substrates (often aluminum or copper) with an etching needle. Drawing through subtraction with such a delicate tool requires contemplative patience and focus, slowly revealing an image from a layer of opaque paint.
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Luis Flores
b. 1985Luis Flores works in a multitude of mediums from sculpture to performance, photography, and drawing. His life-sized figure sculptures are made entirely by hand, crocheted and constructed, existing as his personal doppelgangers, their arms and legs arranged in various choreographed positions, alone or in play with additional Luis Flores bodies. This humorous and provocative type of self-portraiture conflates notions of masculinity and pre-conceived expectations of materiality. In Flores's life-sized self-portrait drawings, a single charcoal line outlines his naked body. By covering his genitalia with an additional self-portrait, Flores again draws attention to the complexities of the language of gender and masculinity.
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"Art to me is everything. It is a way of going on vacation without leaving home." - Timothy Washington