Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection aims to offer new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than one hundred works on view, including pieces from Argentinian Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, 1941), reveal how artists have reinvented portraiture during the last sixty years. 

Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual. 

Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

The show can be visited at the Whitney Museum until February 12, 2017, and is is curated by Dana Miller, Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Permanent Collection and Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator with Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant; Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator; and Sasha Nicholas, consulting curator. 

For more information, please visit the museum’s website.