Identity

Identity explores how identity in American culture is often as much about how people present themselves to the world as it is externally determined. Exploring community, celebrity, and individual identity through portraiture from the Amon Carter’s permanent collection, the exhibition highlights the exciting new acquisitions of Sedrick Huckaby’s The 99% and Glenn Ligon’s print series Runaways. 

Whereas Huckaby engaged with and depicted 101 members of his neighborhood to uncover how their individual personalities were reflective of a larger community identity, Ligon explored the notion that individual identity is often culturally determined. Their works—in combination with prints and photographs of and by public figures such as Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe, statesman Martin Luther King Jr., and painter Georgia O’Keeffe—show the various personas individuals adopt. Together, these portraits represent the fluid and constantly shifting role of identity in society from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.