portraits of the pandemic

Exhibition Opening & Member Preview – Virtual Event

Join us for a virtual exhibition opening and member preview of the new DuMA exhibition, “Portraits of the Pandemic”: An Exhibition of Self-Portraits by Local Artists. We will start our evening with an interview of our Curator and Registrar, Stacy Peterson by Telegraph Herald Features Editor, Megan Gloss. Then we will join “Portraits” artists Lisa Towers, Gregory T. Nelson and Angela Ventris in the Falb Gallery for one on one interviews with Kay Schroeder, Marketing & Engagement Manager.

“Portraits of the Pandemic” is an exhibition of self-portraits made during the pandemic by artists in Dubuque and surrounding counties in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. It also aims to examine how the pandemic and the subsequent effects to our social and physical interactions have reshaped our lives.

“Portraits” opens October 24, 2020 and continues through February 7, 2021

This a free event that will require no registration and you will be able to tune in to watch this event LIVE via the DuMA Facebook profile or on our YouTube channel.

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-8

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun

French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun (French, 1755–1842) was best known as Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter for a decade. She also enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers and was elected to art academies in ten cities.

Trained by her portrait painter father, Vigée-LeBrun demonstrated a gift for the arts at an early age. By age 15 she was earning enough money to support her widowed mother and siblings. At 21 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun, a painter and art dealer who helped her gain valuable access to the art world.

By the 1770s, she was taking clients. By 1783, she had claimed one of the four seats reserved for women at the Academy, due to direct intervention from Queen Marie Antoinette, her most famous subject, and King Louis XVI. Because of her high-profile relationship with Marie Antoinette she was forced to flee the country at the time of the French Revolution.

Image was vital to Vigée Le Brun’s promotion as an artist, and her self-portraits are a skillful combination of fine art and advertising. They depict a self-confident artist who is aware and worthy of the tradition of the Old Masters.

Feeling inspired? For information on how to submit your self-portrait, click the link below:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-6

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Paula Modersohn-Becker

German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was best known for her expressionistic self-portraits, scenes of children with their mothers, and brooding landscapes. Painted in luminous colors and crude brushstrokes, her works were inspired by Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Modersohn-Becker was one of the first German artists to work in a style that became known as Expressionism.

Modersohn-Becker made numerous self-portraits, in countless variations. She was likely the first modern woman artist to have painted nude self-portraits.

Despite selling only three paintings during her lifetime, her distinct style, perseverance in overcoming considerable barriers to women artists, and daring subject matter made her an artist few could ignore. Undaunted by the scant recognition she received, she felt she had made a leap forward with her large-scale nudes and self-portraits, writing that through this highly personal body of work, “I will make something of myself.”

One of her last paintings, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907), was painted while she was pregnant. Later that year, she died of complications just 20 days after giving birth to a daughter. She was 31 years old.

Inspired to submit? Click the link below:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-1

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Jacob Lawrence

American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was best known for his dynamic and vibrant depictions of African American life and history. Unlike many artists, he rarely engaged in self-portraiture. In a rare self-portrait Lawrence portrayed himself as an artist in his studio in Seattle, Washington. The artist is surrounded by his tools and materials–tubes and jars of paint, clamps, a drill, a lathe, and a hammer. On the left, one of Lawrence’s paintings hangs on the wall. It is an image of Harriet Tubman leading slaves to freedom, originally executed for a children’s book, Harriet and the Promised Land.

Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1977. Gouache and tempera on paper.

In a self-portrait rendered in ink over graphite on paper, Lawrence concentrated his appearance into a few essential lines and shapes. A black arc describes the shape of his skull. His mustache is a complex of wavy lines flanked by heavier curves evoking folds of aging flesh. Lawrence left most of his face white to set off the abstracted black shapes of his nose, eyes, mouth, and mustache.

Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1993, Ink over graphite on paper

Feeling inspired? Click the link below for information on how to submit your self-portrait:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-May-30

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Gustave Courbet

French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was the leader of the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Rejecting academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists, Courbet’s work reflected the unvarnished truth of life as he saw it.

Gustave Courbet, Le Désespéré (1845)

Courbet made numerous self-portraits, both as a method off self-promotion and as a way of finding his artistic style. For an artist who espoused realism many of his self-portraits are decidedly romantic in nature. His self-portrait Le Désespéré (1845) nearly leaps off the canvas. It shows the wild-eyed 24-year old artist staring out at the viewer, his hands tearing at his unkempt hair. Courbet presents himself as the tortured genius struggling for recognition and something to eat.

The self-portrait meant a great deal to Courbet as he took it with him to exile in Switzerland and it remained in his studio until his death.

Inspired to submit? Click the link:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-May-26

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oking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait:Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a leading twentieth-century German printmaker and sculptor who explored the themes of motherhood, oppression, death, war and sacrifice. Much of her work is autobiographical and self-portraiture was one of her chief forms of expression.

From age 18, when she was an art student in Berlin, until she reached 76, two years before her death at the end of the Second World War, Kollwitz created more than 100 self-portraits. Kollwitz battled depression throughout her life, but it was the tragic death of her son at the onset of World War I that left an indelible mark on her spirit. Her self-portraits capture the depth of raw emotion of an artist who was tormented by great loss, grief and pain.

Inspired to submit? Click the link https://dbqart.org/portraits-of-the-pandemic/

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-May-23

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Cindy Sherman

“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told”

For four decades, American photographer Cindy Sherman has used her own body in a variety of roles and persona to explore cultural themes of gender, identity, and celebrity.

Sherman is a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.

Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”

Inspired to submit? Click the link https://dbqart.org/portraits-of-the-pandemic/

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-May-19

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Jan Van Eyck

Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck’s “Portrait of a Man in a Turban” is regarded as the earliest known self-portrait. Like many things in art history, this view is not unanimous. The inscription at the top of the frame has been cited as strong evidence in favor of the attribution. It reads “Als Ich Can” (as I/Eyck can) which is a pun on the painter’s name.

Van Eyck painted both secular and religious work. He was an in-demand portrait painter of the emerging merchant class, known for his manipulation of oil paint, meticulous attention to detail and keen powers of observation. Van Eyck apparently depicted himself in two other works; he seems to be reflected in the mirror in the “Arnolfini Portrait” and in Saint George’s armor, in his helm and on the shield of St George in “The Madonna Of Cannon Van Der Paele”.

Participate in “Portraits of the Pandemic,” click here for more info!