Sheldon Museum of Art presents "Person of Interest," an exhibition of portraiture spanning all nine of the building's second-floor galleries.
Drawing inspiration for its title from a phrase ranging in connotation from a potential love interest to a prospective source of information in a matter under investigation, "Person of Interest" explores the different ways in which identity is expressed in portraiture.
The exhibition, which includes works from the late nineteenth century to today, tests the very definition of the genre through depictions of the literal and abstracted body. It asks open-ended questions about self-fashioning, cultural memory, gender identity, and performance of identity. In so doing, it prompts conversations about race and representation, institutional power, lived experience, and other relevant and timely issues.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Sheldon offers free, public events including:
Portraiture and Power
A conversation with Joy Castro and Rhi Johnson
March 17 at 5:30pm
Joy Castro, Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska, and Rhi Johnson, a visiting scholar from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will discuss what we—in today’s age of relentless image making and self-portraiture—can learn about the representation of femininity from late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Spanish and Hispanophone artists and writers.
Picturing Identity
A conversation with artists Radcliffe Bailey, Renée Cox, and Renée Stout
April 2 at 5:30pm
Three artists represented in the exhibition “Person of Interest”—Radcliffe Bailey, Renée Cox, and Renée Stout—will discuss portraiture in the contexts of race and gender identity, cultural legacy, and memory. Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, will moderate the conversation. Program support is provided by Hixson-Lied Endowment.
"Person of Interest" is on view January 31 through July 5, 2020. Admission is free. For more information, visit sheldonartmuseum.org.
More details at: http://sheldonartmuseum.org