When curator Taína Caragol began to organize the latest exhibition of contemporary portraiture at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., she says she wanted to “bust apart” the notion of what defines a portrait. So for “Portraiture Now: Staging the Self,” she included collages, photographs, and paintings—all marked by elements of theatricality. “A lot of people who visit us have a certain expectation of what they want to see on the walls,” she says. “So I think it’s a healthy thing to question what portraiture can be. We have portraits in the show that don’t have faces.”
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