Face America

American artists have created a range of portraits as diverse as America itself. A prominent genre since before the country’s founding, portraits serve public and private functions. Portraits can be personal, capturing the relationship between artist and sitter, but they can also be public, shaping the sitter’s outward-facing identity.

Face America features 29 portraits from the museum’s permanent collection. Through images from Benjamin West’s Saint Thomas à Becket, made in 1797, to Sedrick Huckaby’s The 99%—Highland Hills: “D” Nabors, drawn in 2012, this exhibition will provide opportunities to face, confront, and contemplate an ever-changing America. Taken together, these portraits offer a glimpse of how this genre has evolved in the hands of American artists over more than two hundred years.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website