NEW YORK.- Portraiture has been among the most persistent genres in art history, whose purpose and meaning changes through cultural context. “Self and Subject,” on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 11, 2005, highlights the contemporary fascination with identity and self-awareness through portraits by self-taught artists.

Lee Kogan, director of the museum's Folk Art Institute and curator of special projects for The Contemporary Center, has selected approximately 50 twentieth-century artworks drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and private collections. The portraits of self and subject are realized in a variety of media—paintings, sculpture, pottery, textiles, and photography.

Portraits were the most significant art form in America until the daguerreotype replaced the painted image by the middle of the nineteenth century. Portraits also functioned as a visual record of a growing class of professionals, merchants, and farmers who wished to commemorate their accomplishments and capture themselves and their families in a permanent form. Nineteenth-century folk painters John Brewster Jr., Erastus Salisbury Field, Sheldon Peck, Ammi Phillips, and William Matthew Prior were among the notable itinerant artists who established successful careers cultivating clientele and painting commissioned portraits as they traveled from town to town.

The introduction of photography superseded the documentary role of commissioned portraits, but portraiture, as explored by self-taught artists, has survived into the twenty first century. Although a portrait is meant to represent an actual person, and objective elements such as facial features, hairstyles, and attire are usually depicted, physical likeness is not an absolute requirement. The form and style of rendering may be subjective and interpreted differently by each artist and viewer. The portraits in the exhibition are often challenging and provocative. Not merely mimetic, contemporary portrait artists often focus on revealing psychological aspects of character and personality. “Linked to identity and self-awareness, portraits can be powerful forms, probing the inner consciousness, character, personality, and drives for the portrait artist, his subject, and the viewer with the potential to engage them in a dynamic relationship. Through portraits, artists reveal themselves and their subjects, producing individual, and at times, the more universal traits of their sitters,” comments Ms. Kogan.

The explosion in popular culture has also profoundly affected portraiture. Artists have chosen to depict entertainers (Ray Charles by Sam Doyle), sports heroes (Joe DiMaggio stitched by Ray Materson), and film stars (Fay Wray in a pastel on tempera by Stephen Warde Anderson). Contemporary portraits range from straightforward representations such as Drossos Skyllas’s Self Portrait and Joseph Aulisio’s portrait of tailor Frank Peters to penetrating psychological depictions as seen in a self-portrait by Mose Tolliver or John Kane’s Seen in a Mirror. They may be abstract, emblematic, or symbolic, as in A.G.Rizzoli’s meticulously rendered depiction of his mother as a Gothic “kathredal” (sic) in Mother Symbolically Recaptured/The Kathredal. Portraits may also be illuminated by context such as Malcah Zeldis’s inclusion of herself dancing in Roseland, an autobiographical narrative scene that represents the artist's desires and dreams.