What Is Portraiture? March 19, 2011

The works in this permanent collection exhibition were selected to challenge and extend conventional concepts of portraiture. A portrait is usually considered to be an artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant in order to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the sitter who is shown in a still position. Although a number of the works on view focus on a single person in stasis, others feature multiple figures in action. Furthermore, historical, modern, and contemporary American and Native American works in a variety of mediums are organized into several broad thematic sections.