The National Portrait Gallery’s Weak, Blinkered Curatorial Vision

The Smithsonian continues to wander deep in the noxious DEI weeds. 

G reetings from the Swamp! I always enjoy visiting. Excise the ruthless bastards, the useless bastards, the liars, reptiles, and Grooms of the Stool — every day is a race for best brown nose — and, yes, it’s a nice city. I’m working at the Archives of American Art on my Allan Stone biography, but the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is nearly across the street. The NPG’s triennial, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, is on view. It celebrates excellence and innovation in American portraiture. The Outwin started in 2006, and in a few short years it’s become much anticipated.

This is my second piece in an off-and-on series on the Smithsonian, a national pride and joy that needs new leadership, starting with the regents and Lonnie Bunch, the secretary. The vampiric 1619 Project is a creature of the Smithsonian as well as of the New York Times. The Smithsonian has been caught over and over in the act of embracing DEI. Last year, President Trump fired the director of the NPG. Whether or not he actually had the power to can her, she’s gone to direct the Milwaukee Art Museum, bringing her passion for DEI to Brew City. The NPG’s curators, birds of a feather, are still in place.

The Outwin is smaller this year, with 34 works of art as opposed to 42 in 2022 and 50 in 2019. Thousands submit art to be considered by this year’s jury of seven. The selection skews black and Latino, as does the jury, and I have no idea whose work was declined. It’s an intimate exhibition. Each gallery has five or so works, and sometimes only one, and a hallway displays art on the walls and, in one case, from the ceiling. It’s beautifully arranged. The deep blue-green wall color in the hallway, dark and mysterious, is inspired.

Hanging from the ceiling as visitors enter is Adrián Román’s La caja de la memoria viva: Tite Curet Alonso, from 2024. It’s a 48-inch square box, with a portrait painted on the outside of the box, so it passes for a head. Inside the box are souvenirs, mostly photographs, from the subject’s life. The Spanish phrase la caja de la memoria vida means that the subject is experienced and has lived life with all its ups and downs to the point that he’s widely admired and respected. Román (b. 1977) is among the half dozen or so Puerto Rican artists in the Outwin. Tite Curet Alonso was the famous salsa and samba composer. I like it in part because it’s unexpected. Why not look up?

Arcmanoro Niles’s I Got Some Good Friends That Remind Me of Myself is an oil, acrylic, and glitter painting from 2023, big at 53 by 67 inches, and talk about wall power. Niles (b. 1989) specializes in portraits of black men who are on the cusp of change. The picture’s subtitle is We Were Children Dressed Up Like Men, and dressed up they are in luminous blue, orange, red, and purple, and with ebony and gold skin. They look fierce, but how to take them seriously with all that glitter? We all go through stages of life, and I Got Some Good Friends is the macho phase. The glowing, golden skin? Niles says that’s part of memory. Some memories are gauzy. Others are what he calls “turned up” like a first kiss or moments of male bonding, intense moments when daring and insecurity electrify everything. He’s a first-class painter, so I’m glad he’s in the show.

I don’t think Jess T. Dugan (b. 1986) is a very good artist, but, a woman, now identifying as a “they,” and having had chest-reconstruction surgery after the removal of her breasts, Dugan is ubiquitous. I have no idea why. Dugan’s video on raising a child in the face of personal challenges and public scorn is sappy. The best thing I can say about her is that she’s a follower of Catherine Opie.

Keenan’s Keenan was the most beautiful thing in the show. The artist, Clementine Keenan (b. 1995), who now says he’s a woman, starts with a photo of himself as a young boy, drawn from a family album. He copies the photograph on a glass printmaking plate, not much different from a pane of glass, using acrylic, oil pastel, and oil paint to make a blurry, dreamy image of a young boy, looking très petit, with his Sumo-wrestler doll. It’s gauzy, sweet, wistful, and poignant.

I also loved Hebras y Vejigantes, a colorful, exuberant, five-minute video by Gloriann Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón (b. 1980) and Juan Pablo Vizcaíno (b. 1978). It depicts 13 Afro–Puerto Ricans — men, women, and children — each taking joy in clothes, hairstyles, local textiles and masks, and music. Vejigantes are people in colorful animal masks. Hebras refers to strands of hair or textile threads. The video is high-spirited and, praise the Lord, no one seems oppressed by colonialism, capitalism, erasure, the patriarchy, the holy rollers, gun toters, the KKK, or the Zionists.

Michael Riding Joel in the Sweepstakes Suite is both wild and perverted, a combo that’s Steven Harwick’s specialty. He’s a fetish artist based in Brooklyn, “cross-disciplinary,” as he describes himself, and he means moving from photography to essay-writing to performance art, not from bondage cuffs to chains to nose hooks, though I imagine he does that, too. It’s Roy Rogers and Smiley Burnette turned libertine. I can’t call Harwick (b. 1991) a new Old Master, giving a twist to the equestrian portrait, but at least he’s not crying about “from the river to the sea” between shouts of “giddyup.”

Down the Barrel (of a Lens) is a 25-minute video installation by Kameron Neal (b. 1992) made from thousands of hours of declassified surveillance footage recorded between 1960 and 1980 by plainclothes New York police officers. Outwin awarded it first prize, which comes with a $25,000 check. A federal court decision — Handschu v. Special Services Division in 1985 — ruled that the police department mustn’t film political and religious groups out and about on the streets of Gotham without a search warrant and unless the cops think a crime’s in the making.

I like parts of Neal’s project. All the clips involve protesters who know they’re being filmed, but rather than scurry or push, they look directly at the camera, waving, kissing boyfriends or girlfriends. Many protest not so much as a part of crowds but as individuals, such as a young man chaining himself to a utility tower he’s just climbed. As protests go, it’s all low-octane, unlike the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots, destruction, and arson from 2020. The clips are black-and-white, each a few seconds long, and take us back to the 1960s and ’70s, dreadful times but I tend to like period pieces.

“What does it mean to be documented in a public space without your consent?” Neal asks in the attractive catalogue. We live in an age of security cameras now, thousands, I’m sure, in New York, in stores, the subway, street corners, office buildings, and who knows where else, so the question seems flimsy. Neal aims at something sinister, but I’m not convinced. If anything, it reinforces my sense that most, especially young people, go to protests for frisson, vanity, social opportunities, and free food. I wonder if anyone at the NYPD ever looked at them.

Down the Barrel is shown on two screens facing each other with exceedingly uncomfortable seating for visitors to watch. Film clips play on each screen, but each screen shows something different. This demands swivel talents few have unless they’re acrobats.

Second prize went to Jared Soares’s Misidentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne, from 2023. The face is Alonzo Sawyer’s. He was arrested in Baltimore in 2022 for assault and robbery based on security cameras and facial-recognition software. The charges were dropped after he proved he wasn’t in Baltimore at the time. Sawyer (b. 1982) has a sympathetic, long-suffering face, and his wife, Carronne, caresses it. To the cops, his face was a mine of nodal points and data patterns. To her, it’s the face she loves. The New Yorker published the photograph in 2023, asserting in a story that facial-recognition software using AI is racist and ageist. I take everything in the New Yorker not with a grain of salt but with a boulder’s worth. My problem with Misidentified, putting aside whether or not the New Yorker story is more fancy than fact, is that the art needs a narrative explanation. It’s an illustration supporting a message. There’s only so much baggage a work of art should carry. It needs to stand on its own.

David Antonio Cruz’s painting of himself with a close friend depicts “queer chosen families formed through mutual love and support as a way to build hope and resilience.” It won third prize. It’s a good painting with a bit too much Alice Neel in it, but I liked it. It’s bold and over-the-top, a tip of the hat to Baroque portraits. Cruz (b. 1974) is high on color — he’s inspired, in part, by the palette of The Wizard of Oz. I would have given him the first prize, but he’s not oppressed enough.

I loved the Teen Portrait Competition, the Outwin’s corollary show with the work of 40 artists picked from over a thousand submissions. Too bad, in a curatorial failure, that the NPG’s showing each work of art in a video and not in the flesh. They’re wonderful, but we see them in intervals of a few seconds. Next time, the museum should do it right, spend the money, get the art to Washington, and display it.

Most curators have probably had the heart-burning experience of filling galleries at the last moment because a planned show cut the surly bonds to Earth, through budget cuts, someone not finishing his or her work on time, a scandal, or, in the case of the NPG, Amy Sherald’s high-dudgeon cancellation of American Sublime, the very good retrospective of her work that the NPG was to show starting late last year into this spring. The Smithsonian, you see, was squeamish about exhibiting Trans Forming Liberty, Sherald’s depiction of a trans woman or a drag queen imitating the Statue of Liberty. It’s a trifle of a picture, but the cesarina Sherald pulled her show in a huff.

What an ingrate. The NPG made her famous by commissioning her to paint Michelle Obama’s portrait. I asked the NPG to show me the contract the Smithsonian had with her and with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which organized American Sublime. After all, she left the NPG with a canyon-size hole in its exhibition schedule that it hastily filled with American Winners: Athletes and Entertainers Who Shaped the Nation, an empty, forlorn exhibition. The contracts are “internal matters,” I was told and not accessible to enquiring minds. I wonder whether there were any contracts at all, which would be gross incompetence. With decent contracts, the NPG could have sued Sherald, SFMoMA, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which grabbed the NPG’s slot.

Anchor portraits such as Marilyn Horne’s in American Winners aren’t good at all and point to the problem the NPG has with quality as well as depth, in both the collection and curatorial talent. Why highlight athletes and entertainers? What about scientists, astronauts, artists, and entrepreneurs? And “winners” seems very Trumpian, which is the last thing the NPG’s curators want. Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of the rapper LL Cool J is big and gaudy and formulaic, but can we say he even remotely “shaped the country,” or that any rapper has or ever will? I would have put the Outwin in this space and the Teen Portrait show in the space now occupied by the Outwin. I think most of the teen-artist works are better than the athlete and entertainer schlock.

There’s so much more to see at what is one of my favorite museums in Washington, though this story, I admit, uses more than a few quibbles in my quiver. I love portraits and like especially its Out of Many: Portraits from 1600 to 1900, the NPG’s anchor permanent-collection exhibition. There’s a good daguerreotype portrait show on view, too. The America’s Presidents gallery has been much improved over the years and will get another redo this spring. The Struggle for Justice, the museum’s permanent civil rights exhibition, continues to be bad, with many of the portraits looking as if they’ve come straight from the undertaker’s. And the “struggle for justice” — a bad title since justice is so amorphous — involves far more than race, sexuality, and women’s rights. The place suffers from groupthink and Swamp think, both curable with better leadership.