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All exhibitions are held at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture,
located at Eighth and F streets N.W., Washington, D.C. For public information, call (202)
633-8300. The National Portrait Gallery is open every day (except December 25th) from 11:30
a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Four Indian Kings
August 2008
The year 2008 marks the 225th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution. To commemorate this event the National Portrait Gallery is showing the earliest surviving full-length oil portraits of North American aboriginal people painted from life. In 1710, four men were chosen to represent the Iroquoian Confederacy of the Mohawk River Valley before Queen Anne to highlight the plight of the colonies in the English military offensive against the French. The men were presented to the Royal court as “kings”. John Verelst was commissioned to paint a portrait of each of the visitors and he did so with all the decorum appropriate to royalty and to heads of state. The paintings are being lent by the Public Archives of Canada.
Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs
October 10, 2008 through February 1, 2009
 Drawn from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Women of Our Time is a photographic celebration of ninety-one of the most creative, humane, controversial, witty, brave, beautiful, and inspirational women of the twentieth-century. These revealing portraits, by an array of distinguished photographers, show women who have reached the summit of achievement in politics, business, arts, sports, performance, music, humanitarianism, and science. There are rarely seen photographs of women such as Marilyn Monroe, Helena Rubenstein, Hannah Arendt, Billie Holiday, Gloria Steinem, Sylvia Plath—and many others.
Two companion publications are available, a larger, coffee table book (10 x 11 in.) and a condensed book (6 x 7.5 in.), both with duotone illustrations. Ann Shumard, curator of photographs, is the exhibition curator.
One Life: The Mask of Lincoln
November 7, 2008 through July 5, 2009
 No American has had more written or said about him than Abraham Lincoln. To both his contemporaries and posterity, Lincoln has been an endless subject of mystery and fascination. The National Portrait Gallery will commemorate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth with an exhibition that will draw on the Portrait Gallery’s collection of Lincoln portraits, a collection that charts Lincoln’s passage from a fresh-faced Illinois congressman to his grizzled isolation as president. The exhibition will provide many faces of Lincoln for the public to ponder. It will show how Lincoln used the new art of photography to convey his image to Americans, letting them see in him what they most desired. David Ward, historian, is the exhibition curator.
View C-SPAN video
Portraiture Now: Feature Photography
December 5, 2008 through May 10, 2009 (closing to be confirmed)
“Portraiture Now: Feature Photography” focuses on six photographers who, by working on assignment for publications such as the New Yorker, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, each bring their distinctive “take” on contemporary portraiture to a broad audience. Critically acclaimed for their independent fine art work, these photographers —Katy Grannan, Jocelyn Lee, Ryan McGinley, Steve Pyke, Martin Schoeller, and Alex Soth — have also pursued a variety of editorial projects, taking advantage of both the opportunities and the parameters that these assignments introduce. The resulting work builds upon a longstanding tradition of photographic portraiture for the popular press and highlights creative possibilities for 21st century portrayal.
Curators for the exhibition are: Ann Shumard, curator of photographs; Wendy Wick Reaves, curator of prints and drawings; Brandon Fortune, curator of painting and sculpture; Anne Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings; and Frank Goodyear, associate curator of photographs.
Presidents in Waiting
January 20, 2009 through January 3, 2010
John Adams, perhaps our most dyspeptic founding father, viewed the office of the vice president as the “most insignificant office” ever invented by man. Adams would probably have never guessed that fourteen vice presidents would succeed to the presidency. The National Portrait Gallery exhibition on the vice presidency will focus on these men -- almost one-third of America’s presidents -- and how they, either by the death of an incumbent or by winning election on their own, became presidents. Drawing on the Gallery’s collections, and including loan items, the show will examine the early careers of these men in order to understand how they were positioned to be selected as vice presidents. Co-curators of the exhibition are Sid Hart, senior historian, and James Barber, historian.
New Arrivals
January 30, 2009 through November 15, 2009
This exhibition highlights recent acquisitions to NPG’s permanent collection.
Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture
March 27, 2009 through August 2, 2009
 This groundbreaking exhibition casts new light upon Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most influential artists of the recent past. As this show demonstrates, Duchamp harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the artworld. In the process, he played a key role in the reinvention of portraiture, exerting a transformative influence from the early twentieth century to the present. The exhibition showcases approximately 100 never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp ranging from 1912 to the present, including works by his contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by a more recent generation of artists, such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Stutevant, and Yasumasa Morimura. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by MIT Press, featuring new research by leading scholars and a detailed chronology of Duchamp’s life. Co-curators for the exhibition are Anne Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the NPG, and James W. McManus, professor of art history, California State University, Chico.
Image: Marcel Duchamp / by Alfred Stieglitz / Palladium print, 1923 / National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Reflections: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century
April 10, 2009 through August 16, 2009
Drawn from NPG’s prints and drawings collection, the works in this exhibition will focus on themes of youth and age, subjective versus objective portrayal, reflection and refraction, and racial and gender identity. The majority of the approximately 75 works are taken from NPG’s Bowman-Kahn collection, a major donation of modern portraits on paper. The accompanying catalogue will further explore challenging questions of self-presentation that surfaced in the twentieth-century. Wendy Wick Reaves, curator of prints and drawings, is the exhibition curator.
The Frontier Remade: Photographic Portraits from the American West, 1845-1924
September 25, 2009 through January 24, 2010
The American West was dramatically reconstituted during the eighty years between the Mexican War and the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. This exhibition tells the story of these changes through 100 portrait photographs of the defining men and women of this period. It chronicles such events as the completion of the transcontinental railroad, on-going conflicts between Native Americans and non-Natives, the emergence of the national parks movement, and the admittance of 19 new states west of the Mississippi. Visitors will encounter those who explored, fought over, developed, and represented this vast territory—individuals who contributed to the transformation of this region’s nature and identity such as Albert Bierstadt, Kit Carson, Geronimo, John Fremont, Annie Oakley and Brigham Young. A fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition. Frank Goodyear, associate curator of photographs, is the exhibition curator.
Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009
October 23, 2009 through August 22, 2010
 With the generous support of the late Virginia Outwin Boochever, the National Portrait Gallery will hold its second open competition in the summer of 2008, asking artists throughout the United States to submit portraits of people close to them. All visual arts media will be accepted. The juried competition will result in an exhibition of approximately 60 to 70 finalists, with the competition prize winners announced at the opening. A separate People’s Choice Award will be announced several months after the exhibition has been on view. A fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition. Brandon Brame Fortune, curator of painting and sculpture, is the competition director and curator of the exhibition.
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CONTACT US
Dept. of Exhibitions and Collections Management
 Phone: (202) 633-8280
 Email: NPGExhibitions
For exhibition press information, please contact Bethany Bentley, Public Affairs Specialist at:
Email: bentleyb@si.edu
Phone: (202) 633-8280
Mailing Address:
National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
Victor Building–Suite 4100 MRC 973
Washington, DC, 20013-7012
 Staff Offices:
750 Ninth Street NW
Suite 4100
Washington, DC 20001
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PURCHASE GALLERY BOOKS AND CATALOGS
 View the Gallery's extensive collection of books and exhibition catalogs. Publications are available through the National Portrait Gallery or the respective publishers.
 View publications list
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