The Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill is currently featuring The Outwin: American Portraiture of Today, a collection of 43 award-winning pieces selected by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2016 for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
The collection is the first to go on tour and returns to the National Portrait Gallery after its residency at the Ackland ends in August.
The first-place portrait, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), is an oil on canvas created by Amy Sherald. The portrait depicts a young African-American girl standing in front of a colorful background while wearing formal clothing and holding a cup of tea.
Sherald is an African-American artist from Columbus, Georgia, who uses bright colors to contrast with the shading of the central figure in her portraits, which address the impact of stereotyping upon black Americans.
The significance of the contrast is “the amorphous personal space of my own existence within the context of black identity and my search for ways to clarify and ground it,” Sherald said in a interview with the National Portrait Gallery.
The second-place portrait, Mavis in the Backseat, is an inkjet print piece by Cynthia Henebry, an artist from Richmond, Virginia, depicting a young girl sitting in the back of a station wagon.
In a description of the piece to the National Portrait Gallery, Henebry explained that she drew inspiration from the photographic works of her mother, who documented her childhood in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I think that being seen (and not seen) by her—with the camera and without—impacted me in ways I am aware of as well as only beginning to understand,” Henebry said in the statement.
The third place portrait, Eugene #4, is a charcoal and graphite piece by Joel Daniel Phillips, an artist from Oakland, California.
The piece is a part of a series by Phillips entitled No Regrets in Life, drawings of people the artist met on the corner of Mission and Sixth Streets in San Francisco, California. The portraits are usually of homeless people living in the city.
“The renderings are an attempt to play with our voyeuristic tendencies toward the indigence surrounding us, hiding in plain sight. In these portraits, the subjects cease to be dark matter in our communal space and instead are revealed to be the main characters in their own narrative,” Phillips said in a statement to the National Portrait Gallery.
Senior Rachel Broun visited the Gallery at the Ackland.
“It’s an interesting and a vibrant look at the American Portrait Gallery, especially as it comes to North Carolina,” Broun said.
Broun’s favorite piece is the first place winner Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) because of the direct style she found to be similar to the Presidential Portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned by the National Portrait gallery.
The Obama portraits were created by Sherald and fellow artist Kehinde Wiley.
