The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” presents the latest in contemporary portraiture by finalists from the seventh edition of the museum’s national portrait competition. Established in 2006 through a private endowment, the triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition invites artists (ages 18 and over) living and working in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, to submit one portrait created in the past three years for consideration by a panel of experts. The finalists’ works are then shown in an exhibition.​​

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” includes 34 portraits (by 35 artists) in mediums ranging from painting, photography and sculpture to immersive, time-based media installations. 

The artworks were chosen from more than 3,300 submissions to an anonymous open call, which was juried by experts in the fields of portraiture and contemporary art. The selection features portraits by artists based in 12 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico including the competition’s three prizewinners: Kameron Neal of Brooklyn, NY (first prize), Jared Soares of Washington, DC (second prize), and David Antonio Cruz of New York, NY (third prize). Neal’s two-channel video installation “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” (2023) draws upon his time as a public artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Records, and it places the audience between two screens of declassified New York Police Department surveillance footage filmed between 1960 and 1980. As the first-prize winner, Neal will receive $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the museum’s permanent collection. Soares’s photograph “Misidentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne” (2023) is a portrait of a Maryland resident who was falsely accused of a crime and arrested based on facial recognition software. Cruz's painting “isaiditoncebefore,butnowIfeelitevenmore​_feelin’pretty,pretty,pretty” (2023), part of the artist’s “chosenfamilies” series, shows the artist with Archel, one of his lifelong friends. Soares and Cruz will receive $10,000 and $7,500, respectively. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit:  "isaiditoncebefore,butnowIfeelitevenmore​_feelin'pretty,pretty,pretty" from the series “chosenfamilies” by David Antonio Cruz, 2023. Oil and Flashe paint (vinyl) on wood. The Newark Museum of Art; purchase 2024 Contemporary Art Society of Great Britain.