ICONS: Selections from The Portrait Unbound

ICONS showcases photographer Robert Weingarten’s innovative and ground breaking visual biographies of notable American ICONS including Henry Aaron, Stephen Sondheim, Sandra Day O’Connor, Colin Powell, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alice Waters.

 

These compelling, large scale photographs are a bold departure from traditional portraiture. They use layers of images to create a mosaic that alludes to interests, achievements and memories in the subjects’ life. They literally describe the “sitter” from a biographical rather than a physical perspective….based on the subjects’ answers to the question,  “What make you who you are?” Thus, they “unbound” a traditional physical portraiture perspective. In doing so, they also encourage greater viewer engagement with the subject and with American history.

 

ICONS is the third in a new arts initiative at the museum. A Jazz Memoir…Photographs by Herb Snitzer and Culture Shock…Photographs by John Gutmann preceded this.

 

Bob Yellowlees, an art collector and founder of Lumière, noted, “Having collected Robert Weingarten’s work for 25 years and curated over 50 exhibitions that included some 60 master photographers, I feel that his “portraits without people” is one of the most Imaginative and engaged in the potential of digital technologies in the arts.”