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

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

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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 the exhibition span the years 1984 to 2020.

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[1] VISIO2_210514_001.JPG	[2] VISIO2_210514_005.JPG	[3] VISIO2_210514_014.JPG
[4] VISIO2_210514_024.JPG	[5] VISIO2_210514_029.JPG	[6] VISIO2_210514_035.JPG
[7] VISIO2_210514_043.JPG	[8] VISIO2_210514_047.JPG	[9] VISIO2_210514_057.JPG
[10] VISIO2_210514_061.JPG	[11] VISIO2_210514_065.JPG	[12] VISIO2_210514_073.JPG
[13] VISIO2_210514_083.JPG	[14] VISIO2_210514_089.JPG	[15] VISIO2_210514_097.JPG
[16] VISIO2_210514_102.JPG	[17] VISIO2_210514_119.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VISIO2_210514_001.JPG: This gallery presents portraits by artists Chuck Close, Nelson Shanks, and Jack Beal, whose work Ian and Annette Cumming fervently supported. Chuck Close has been making large-scale portraits of friends, family, and others he admires for more than five decades. Employing a range of media (painting, photography, printmaking, and textiles), he brings fresh perspectives to portraiture. Close began collaborating with Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions in 2003. Together, they have made tapestries, such as the three shown in this gallery, using imaging software and computerized fabrication techniques. The art of Nelson Shanks conveys the emotions and inner lives of his prominent sitters. "We read more from human facial expressions and bodily gestures than probably any other subject in nature," he observed. In addition to the subjects presented here, Shanks painted portraits of several other luminaries, notably Pope John Paul II; Diana, Princess of Wales; and President Ronald Reagan. Jack Beal made portraits, historical studies, and murals at a time when abstraction and conceptualism reigned. Working from life, he painted densely composed and dramatically lit images, which the critic Peter Schjeldahl notes, "makes his work so pressure-packed, so difficult, and so good."
2. VISIO2_210514_005.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, 2008-9
3. VISIO2_210514_024.JPG: Mstislav Rostropovich, 1927-2007 Mstislav Rostropovich, who was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., from 1977 to 1994, studied piano and cello while growing up in the former Soviet Union. After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1948, he began touring internationally and earned a reputation as a world-renowned cellist. Later on, however, the Soviet government restricted Rostropovich's travel for having supported the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The musician and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, a soprano, lost their Soviet citizenship in 1978, when they were living in the United States. It wasn't until 1990, after Rostropovich had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1987), that Mikhail Gorbachev's government restored their citizenship. Nelson Shanks set this portrait in the abbey church of V�zelay, France, where Rostropovich had performed Johann Sebastian Bach's six suites for unaccompanied cello. The letters B-A-C-H appear in the four stained glass windows in the background. Nelson Shanks, 2006
4. VISIO2_210514_035.JPG: Mstislav Rostropovich (Study of Hands) Nelson Shanks
5. VISIO2_210514_043.JPG: Mstislav Rostropovich (Compositional Study) Nelson Shanks
6. VISIO2_210514_057.JPG: Mstislav Rostropovich (Head Study) Nelson Shanks
7. VISIO2_210514_061.JPG: Al Gore, born 1948 Al Gore served as vice president of the United States for two terms under President Bill Clinton. He ran for president in 2000 but was defeated by George W. Bush in one of the closest and most hotly contested elections in American history. Gore went on to chair Current TV and now focuses on addressing the climate change crisis. After winning an Academy Award in 2007 for An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to combat global warming. His second film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, was released in 2017. In 2000, artist Chuck Close made portraits to raise funds for Gore's presidential campaign. Working with Magnolia Editions, he created wall-size Jacquard tapestry portraits based on a Polaroid image that he took on July 23, 2000, in New York City. This tapestry was produced for the Cummings in 2009. Chuck Close, 2009
8. VISIO2_210514_065.JPG: Visionary: The Cumming Family Collection
9. VISIO2_210514_083.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, 1995
10. VISIO2_210514_089.JPG: Obama 2012 (I) Obama 2012 (II) 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, 2012
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