Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction

Brandon Brame Fortune is Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. She has worked at the National Portrait Gallery since 1987. She was the Portrait Gallery's coordinator for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006 and 2009. She was a co-curator for the 2008 National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture, and is the leader of the Portrait Gallery's Portraiture Now” team.Wendy Wick Reaves, curator of prints and drawings, is Interim Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Reaves established the graphic arts department at the National Portrait Gallery in 1974. The collections she has developed include fine-art prints and drawings, rare books and illustrated journals, posters, caricatures and cartoons. Reaves is the curator of numerous exhibitions for the Portrait Gallery on subjects ranging from the 18th to the 20th century. Her books include Reflections/Refractions: Self Portraiture in the Twentieth Century” (2009) and Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” (2008), Eye Contact: Modern American Portrait Drawings” (2002) and Celebrity Caricature in America” (1998). Reaves has also served as one of the curators of the ongoing Portraiture Now” series which celebrate progressive forms of portrayal in contemporary art. She is currently working on an upcoming exhibition titled Face Value: Portraiture in an Age of Abstraction,” which will examine mid-20th century portraiture.David C. Ward is an historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian institution where he has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and 2010's award winning Hide/Seek. Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” His poetry has been published in PN Review and other venues; his little collection Internal Difference was published by Lintott/Carcanet in 2011.