Vinson Cunningham has covered African American art and portraiture in The New Yorker for many years. Notably, his 2016 essay on the African American Museum in DC and more recent article on “radical” portraits both take up the question of the role of art and its preservation in the arena of politics and cultural negotiation. (Both of these are attached below for you to read, although “How Radical Can a Portrait Be?” is the only required one for this discussion board.) He forces us to consider the sometimes problematic intersections found among collective memorialization, historical narrative, aesthetic representation, and, perhaps the most important for any living artist, audience reception.
Consider for example this excerpt where he writes, “I found myself excited to learn that Hendricks preferred to steer his discussion of the work away from politics and toward technique. The world’s complications were obvious enough. Painting, however infected by the news, was its own reward, and people justified their presence on his canvases not as instruments or agitprop but as agents of unlikely continuity with the past.”
After reading and thinking on these points, I’d like you to do the following in your response: 1. Address Cunningham’s reflections re: portraiture, politics, and art generally; 2. Go to the National Portrait Gallery website (https://npg.si.edu/portraits) and choose a portrait; 3. Either attach or embed the image to your response OR copy/paste the URL to its page on the NPG website; 4. Write 4-5 sentences expressing your thoughts about the portrait’s politics. Draw on Cunningham when/where necessary, but broadly, you might consider things like: what colors are used? is it realistic or more abstract/interpretative? is the figure standing, sitting, in action? are there objects included? is the figure in profile or looking straight on? etc.
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