Review – Portraiture Now: Staging the Self

Portraiture Now: Staging the Self was curated by Taina Caragol, Rebecca Kasemeyer, Dorothy Moss and David C. Ward and features the work of six contemporary U.S. Latino artists—David Antonio Cruz, Carlee Fernandez, María Martínez-Cañas, Rachelle Mozman, Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, and Michael Vasquez.

The curatorial statement reads:

“These artists present identities theatrically, in order to rid portraiture of its reassuring tradition that fixes a person in space and time. They use their work to focus on personal or family issues, telling stories that they have remembered or imagined from their past, manipulating images of themselves or superimposing portraits of their loved ones on their own. Like actors searching for a character, they are looking both for their unique identity traits and for shared traits. In the process, portraiture loses its feeling of certainty and instead becomes a map for finding oneself and others.The artist in Staging the Self subvert the limits of traditional portraiture, turning it form the objective and determined toward the subjective and unstable. Crosscutting between racial, social and gender identities, the artist demonstrate the flexibility of portraiture as an art genre and our continual reinvention of the self.....”

Read the full review here.