BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Visionary: The Cumming Family Collection (Part 2) -- Preparing to open

DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (NPG) -- Exhibit: Visionary: The Cumming Family Collection (Part 2) -- Preparing to open:

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Description of Pictures: Visionary: The Cumming Family Collection (Part 2)
December 4, 2020 - January 24, 2021
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery presents “Visionary: The Cumming Family Collection,” revealing the results of more than 25 years of inspired collecting by Ian and Annette Cumming and installed in two parts. Part two, featured here, includes portraits by American artists Jack Beal, Chuck Close and Nelson Shanks. This exhibition is curated by Chief Curator Emerita Brandon Brame Fortune and will be accompanied by a limited-edition publication.
Beginning in 1995, the Cummings worked with their friend D. Dodge Thompson to commission or acquire more than two dozen portraits of national and global leaders. The collection includes likenesses of Warren Buffett, Al Gore, Denyce Graves, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison and E.O. Wilson, all of which were created by important American artists. Twenty-two of the portraits are gifts or promised gifts to the Portrait Gallery, among them “The Four Justices” by Shanks, an iconic group portrait featuring the women of the Supreme Court: Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“There is a long history of commissioning portraits for public institutions,” Fortune said. “Commissioning portraits for a personal collection, however, has become very rare. We are fortunate to receive this substantial gift of works by leading American artists and thank the Cumming family for their support of artists and their generosity toward the museum.”
In America’s early years, a few patrons commissioned portraits from leading artists of the day. Thomas Jefferson, for example, chose to support representations of the great heroes of the American Revolution and leaders in government, science and the arts. Today, the Cummings’ vision and enlightened patronage have resulted in portraits of figures whose work has advanced the fields of art, science and business, as well as civil rights and activism. Portraits in ...More...

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] VISIO2_201120_02.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] VISIO2_201120_06.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] VISIO2_201120_18.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] VISIO2_201120_20.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VISIO2_201120_02.JPG: James Dewey Watson born 1928 James Watson and his collaborator Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their 1953 discovery of the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Understanding the configuration of DNA -- the carrier of genetic information for most living organisms -- paved the way for groundbreaking research on human diseases. Watson spent many years directing the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, teaching and writing influential books. He retired in 2007, however, after suggesting that the intelligence of those of African descent might not be the same as that of other people. This was the very first portrait commissioned by the Cummings, working with D. Dodge Thompson, and the only one for which they did not select the artist. The figurative painter Jack Beal captured Watson in his Cold Spring Harbor office, which was filled with many objects and images related to his work and awards, including his Nobel Prize citation. Jack Beal (1931–2013) Oil on canvas, 1995 Gift of Ian M. and Annette P. Cumming
2. VISIO2_201120_18.JPG: The Lecture (Edward O. Wilson) Biologist Edward O. Wilson (born 1929), a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, has been a leading force in the biodiversity movement since the 1980s. Trained as an entomologist specializing in ants, Wilson's work has taken him from New Guinea and Sri Lanka to the Smithsonian Institution. His groundbreaking study, Sociobiology:The New Synthesis, was published by Harvard University Press in 1975, sparking controversy. In the book, Wilson examines the biological basis of social behavior in all kinds of organisms, including vertebrates, and links those behaviors to evolutionary biology. The scientist's later work bridges the gap between science and the culture at large, as in Consilience: The Unity of Life (1998). He continues to write for a general audience and recently published Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life (2016). This portrait shows Wilson in his office at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is surrounded by his books, papers, and awards. Nelson Shanks (1937–2015) Oil on canvas, 2008–9 Gift of Ian M. and Annette P. Cumming
3. VISIO2_201120_20.JPG: Obama 2012 (I) Barack Obama born 1961 In 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first African American to be elected president, capping a meteoric rise in politics and concluding a campaign that encouraged progress and optimism. Even though he entered the White House as the United States was undergoing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Obama expeditiously enacted the Affordable Care Act, which extended health benefits to millions of previously uninsured Americans. During his tenure, the mission to kill al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was successful, but the president's pledge to close the Guantanamo prison went unrealized. When Obama left office, the feelings of solidarity that had been fostered in his campaign languished. Chuck Close took two large-format Polaroid photographs of President Obama in 2012 (one smiling, one serious) and used them to create double portraits in a variety of media. In January 2013, Ian and Annette Cumming loaned this set of tapestries to the National Portrait Gallery, where they were placed on view for President Obama's second inauguration. Chuck Close (born 1940) Jacquard tapestry, 2012 The Cumming Collection Obama 2012 (II) Chuck Close (born 1940) Jacquard tapestry, 2012 Gift of Ian M. and Annette P. Cumming
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2020 photos: Well, that was a year, wasn't it? The COVID-19 pandemic cut off most events here in DC after March 11. The child president's handling of the pandemic was a series of disastrous missteps and lies, encouraging his minions to not wear masks and dramatically increasing infections and deaths here.The BLM protests started in June, made all the worse by the child president's inability to have any empathy for anyone other than himself. Then of course he tried to steal the election in November. What a year! Trips: Because of COVID, the farthest distance I traveled after that was about 40 miles. I only visited sites in four states -- Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and DC -- and didn't do any overnight travel anywhere. That was the least amount of travel I had done since 1995. Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: about 246,000, the fewest number of photos I had taken in any year since 2007.
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