When visiting the Brooklyn Museum on Sunday, I was very excited to get a chance to see the Soul of a Nation show.  I had read through the catalog, but I had yet to see most of the works in person.  Walking through the exhibition, I was totally enraptured by the works I saw hanging on the walls.  From images of people to works of abstraction, I was finding something different I liked around each corner.

In terms of portraiture, I found Wadsworth Jarrell’s paintings to be particularly compelling.  I was fixated on his painting Revolutionary (Angela Davis) from 1971.  Her mouth is frozen in speech, and words spiral out from her mouth forming her face, body, clothes, and the background.  She is the embodiment of her words, her voice and her passion.  The psychedelic colors push the image even further.  She seems otherworldly, and the image almost seems devotional.

As I look back on other portraits that have stopped me in my tracks, the Gerhard Richter portrait in the YUAG immediately comes to mind.  Though a very simple image, it is striking due to the fuzzy realism Richter portrays.  The portrait looks like a blurry photo, a clear likeness of an actual human.  He isn’t posed for the camera like a traditional portrait, he is caught at an awkward angle in a strange moment in a car.  Taken at the angle of a selfie, this portrait is incredibly intimate while depicted on a very large scale canvas. The man’s face pushes against the canvas, trying to breakthrough the fuzzy perspective.  He is instead, trapped in his car, and frozen in the moment.