CHAPEL HILL, NC.- The Ackland Art Museum presents “The Outwin: American Portraiture Today,” a major exhibition from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery featuring the finalists of its sixth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The exhibition will be on view from Nov. 3, 2023, through Jan. 21, 2024. Every three years, artists living and working in the United States are invited to submit one of their recent portraits to a panel of experts chosen by the Portrait Gallery. In 2022, 42 works were selected from over 2,700 entries in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, time-based media, textiles and performance art. The resulting presentation reflects the compelling and diverse approaches that today’s artists are using to tell the American story through portraiture. Finalists have come from 14 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

“The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition was founded to support the next wave of contemporary portraiture in the United States,” said Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “The diversity of this edition’s entries, from geographic origin to subject matter and media, reflects both the multifaceted story of the United States today and the unique perspectives and lenses through which contemporary artists see that story. Produced in the past three years, it is no surprise that the art provides a powerful affirmation of the human experience focused on the pain of the COVID-19 pandemic, demands for social justice, personal isolation, familial ties, community support, love and loss.”

“When the Ackland hosted the previous iteration of 'The Outwin: American Portraiture Today,' we were amazed by the enthusiastic response it received from our communities. With it, we saw how portraiture is a visual medium that is key in communicating both people’s disparate experiences and humanity’s shared yearnings. We cannot wait to see the messages that emerge from this latest edition of the competition,” said Lauren Turner, Associate Curator for Contemporary Art and Special Projects at the Ackland.

The competition’s first-prize winner, Alison Elizabeth Taylor of Brooklyn, New York, created a portrait titled “Anthony Cuts under the Williamsburg Bridge, Morning” (2020), in which she depicts Brooklyn-based hair groomer Anthony Payne in a process that Taylor developed and named “marquetry hybrid.” Using vivid paints, inkjet prints and the natural grains of over 100 wood veneers, Taylor created the multilayered portrait after encountering Payne in her neighborhood. With his workplace shuttered as a result of the pandemic, Payne was offering donation-based haircuts to support Black Lives Matter, and Taylor was struck by the way he embodied perseverance and solidarity. She made drawings of him from life and used those, along with photographs, to develop the portrait’s composition. She received a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. Previous first-prize winners are David Lenz (2006), Dave Woody (2009), Bo Gehring (2013), Amy Sherald (2016), and Hugo Crosthwaite (2019).

Second prize was awarded to Tom Jones of Madison, Wisconsin, who submitted a photograph embellished with beads, rhinestones and shells titled “Elizah Leonard” (from the series “Strong Unrelenting Spirits”) (2019). Third prize was awarded to Pao Houa Her of Blaine, Minnesota, for her photograph featuring a man of Hmong descent, “untitled (man)” (2019). This year’s commended artists are Elsa María Meléndez of Caguas, Puerto Rico, for her textile-based work “Milk” (2020); collaborators Joel Daniel Phillips and Quraysh Ali Lansana of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for their multimedia portrait comprising a drawing entitled “Killed Negative #13 / After Arthur Rothstein” (from the series “Killing the Negative”) and the poem “hospitality” (2020); Stuart Robertson of Lawrence Township, New Jersey, for his mixed-media “Self-Portrait of the Artist” (from the series “Out and Bad”) (2020); and Vincent Valdez of Houston, Texas, for his oil on canvas “People of the Sun (Grandma and Grandpa Santana)” (2019).

Jurors for the 2022 competition were Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator of Native American art, Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Catherine Opie, artist, professor of photography and chair of the art department at the University of California, Los Angeles; Ebony G. Patterson, artist, Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica; and John Yau, poet, critic and professor of critical studies, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Jersey. The Portrait Gallery’s Taína Caragol, curator of painting, sculpture, and Latinx art and history, and former curators Leslie Ureña and Dorothy Moss, also served on the committee.

Caragol is the director of the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and co-curated the exhibition “The Outwin: American Portraiture Today” with Ureña.