August 10, 2018 – August 13, 2019
Eye Contact: Portraits in the Global Age brings together works from the Foundation’s diverse collections of art of the Spanish Americas and digital art for the first time. Eye Contact considers portraiture as a sociological art in which the notion of personhood is subjected to the vicissitudes of globalism. While portraits are commissioned and created to commemorate individual identity, they are repositories—at times unwittingly—of the sociopolitical forces around them: world trade, colonialism, or advances in technology.
The three artworks on view span more than two centuries, from 1776 to 2015, and include Robert Wilson’s video portrait of Lady Gaga in the guise of early nineteenth-century French aristocrat Caroline Riviere, styled in accordance with the famous painting of Riviere by Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres; Andrés Solano’s Portrait of Ana Josepha de Castañeda y de la Requere from 1776; and Daniel Rozin’s Selfish Gene Mirror, in which viewers temporarily become the subject via a small camera and Rozin’s customized “Darwinian” algorithm.
