MoAD’s new show expands what 'Portraits’ mean
Visitors to the Museum of the African Diaspora may enter its just-opened exhibition, “Portraits and Other Likenesses From SFMOMA,” confident of recognizing a portrait when they see one, and leave with that confidence shaken. A sympathetic image of a dressed-up young man trying to act natural while holding an apparently artificial flower shows him sitting before a backdrop of floral-patterned fabric. The exhibition includes a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” (2009), an elaborate costume with Afro-Caribbean aesthetic roots that conceals a wearer’s identity but makes attention-getting sounds with every motion. The work looks nothing like Cave himself, but it and others he has made define a professional identity and serve as an autobiographical marker in that he first made one right after the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police in 1991, thinking of it as a suit of armor. Thinking of contemporary painting at the time, John Berger remarked more than 50 years ago that the social function of a portrait had devolved to mere certification of a privileged sitter’s position in a social hierarchy. Painter Kehinde Wiley plays upon that inkling ironically in a characteristic work such as “Alexander the Great” (2005), which decks out a young black man — who happens to be a nephew of Mickalene Thomas, an artist prominently featured here — in contemporary dress and the trappings of traditional European dignitary portraiture. The idea of portraiture as a matter of self-styling, borrowing the equipment of the ambient culture, gets a thorough going-over in the work of Thomas, by means of an elaborate, living-room-like installation and several carefully staged photographs. A moving projected video documentary devoted to her mother provides an anchor of genuine feeling to Thomas’ ensemble of works. Lorna Simpson’s cluster of photographs and framed text, like that of Carrie Mae Weems, represents a conceptual extreme in “Portraits and Other Likenesses,” though they demonstrate, like Glenn Ligon’s suite of prints, that conceptual strategies need not drain works of emotional power. Through a hole in the chair’s seat, drops of red pass and puddle on the floor, making a sort of material allegory of the violent injustice implicit in socioeconomic extremes of high and low and the rationales, racist and otherwise, offered in excuse.