Looking in

Looking In: Portraits and Their Stories

Looking In: Portraits and Their Stories features a curated selection of significant 20th and 21st Century works from regional museums and private collections. The selected portraits express stories of both the artists and their subjects, reflecting movements in modern and contemporary art history.

Beginning in the 20th century, wider access to photography made portraiture more available to artists as well as everyday hobbyists. As a result, painters and printmakers were free to explore outside of the boundaries of realism while depicting the human figure. Often these artists sought to express personality and emotion with symbolic distortions, non-realistic colors, and narrative settings. Using those tools, they were more equipped to express and explore the unique identities of their subjects. The thirty-three artists in this exhibition apply their observational skills to represent not only what a person looks like, but who they are as a multifaceted individual. This process is collaborative, creating a single story that includes the likeness of the sitter and the presence of the artist.

Artwork in this exhibition is on loan from the Eric and Amy Huck Collection, Reading Public Museum, Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, Shauna Frischkorn, Catherine Prescott, Robert Armetta, The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Programs

Read Philip Pearlstein’s reflections on fellow artist Chuck Close here.

Discover the hidden shapes in Salvador Dali’s Leda Atomica here.