The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today
Exhibition catalogue
5 x 8 ½ in.
96 pp.
$14.95
73 color reproductions
Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-9786657-9-1
Published to accompany the exhibition The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, celebrating the finalists of the seventh triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.
This gemlike publication presents the work of the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition’s thirty-five finalists. In addition to an engaging essay by Taína Caragol, the National Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, who directed this year’s triennial, the book features insightful entries on this year’s top prizewinners written by Charlotte Ickes, the museum’s curator of time-based media art and special projects and co-curator of the exhibition. Four of the competition’s other jurors (Carla Acevedo-Yates, Huey Copeland, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Daniel Lind-Ramos) also contributed short texts and served on the jury with Rhea L. Combs, the Portrait Gallery’s director of curatorial affairs.
In addition to showcasing excellence in the art of portraiture, The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today highlights how contemporary artists are engaging with the genre and redrawing its boundaries to contemplate what it means to be human. This book, the competition, and the exhibition are the realization of a gift made by Virginia Outwin Boochever (1920–2005) to the Smithsonian. The thirty-five selected artworks were chosen through an open call that garnered more than 3,300 entries from artists working across the United States and Puerto Rico.
