Roger Catlin

Museums Correspondent

She is already known to her millions of fans as “Queen Bey.” So, it’s fitting that, in her likeness that now hangs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter wears a golden crown that seems to emanate from her forehead.

The glossy 3.5-foot-high portrait from a 2018 Vogue cover story—the singer’s fourth—is historic: It was the first cover shoot in the magazine’s 126-year history to be done by a Black photographer. The artist, Tyler Mitchell, was just 23 when he shot the image titled See Your Halo.

Installation view
The annual exhibition includes Tyler Mitchell's 2018 portrait of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, titled See Your Halo (above: installation view alongside portraits of Madam C.J. Walker and Carmen de Lavallade). NPG, Mark Gulezian

It will likely be one of the most popular, and certainly one of the most recognizable, images in a recently opened showcase of newly acquired works at the National Portrait Gallery, alongside the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who can be seen in a stately 2020 cast made from the 2013 original by Meredith Bergmann, sculptor of the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York’s Central Park.

When the Portrait Gallery opened more than a half-century ago, just 17 percent of its collection represented women—either as subjects or creators. That number has roughly doubled since then, museum officials say. The new exhibition, “Recent Acquisitions,” does its best to elevate those numbers by concentrating on women subjects and artists.

The 21 recently acquired works in a variety of media, alongside two commissions, showcase what Rhea L. Combs, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs, calls the “diverse contributions by women represented in our collection as artists or as sitters from across disciplines and time periods, as well as the museum’s commitment to telling those wide-ranging stories.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Meredith Bergmann, 2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Meredith Bergmann, 2020 NPG, gift of the artist, © Meredith Bergmann

Among them appears Greta Garbo, one of the most celebrated film stars in the first half of the 20th century. The 1965 smaller-than-life Head of Garbo has another Hollywood connection: This fine work is by the abstract expressionist Robert De Niro Sr., father of the contemporary actor who most recently starred in Killers of the Flower Moon, for whom she was a frequent subject.

Other subjects in this year’s edition of the annual “Recent Acquisitions” series are likely better known for their work than for their images. These include the award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who died in 2006 at age 58. In Bisa Butler’s bright quilt rendering, titled Patternmaster, the author, whose dystopian fictions chillingly mirror much of our world today, looks skyward, glitter accents her hair—with a flying saucer adorning her blouse. The New York Times originally commissioned the artwork last year for a cover story.

Patternmaster, Bisa Butler, 2023
Patternmaster, Bisa Butler, 2023 NPG, Acquired through the generosity of Taylor and Wemimo Abbey; Sol Aponte and Jennia Fredrique Aponte; Mahari Y. Bailey, Esq.; Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. and Janine Sherman Barrois; Ingrid Best; Devin W. Blackburn, Esq.; George and Azita Fatheree; Kenneth T

In one self-portrait, the artist and social justice activist Mildred Howard peeks from behind shiny discs, flanked by green and red stripes reminiscent of David Hammons’ African American Flag, in her 2009 mixed-media assemblage That Was Then and This Is Now III. In another, abstract expressionist painter and printmaker Miriam Beerman depicts herself with a slashing 1950 woodcut; for more than 70 years before her death last year, the artist explored emotional manifestations of oppression and injustice—or what she called the “brutality of our time.”

The artist Ruth Asawa may be most widely known for her mesmerizing, geometric wire sculptures, but she is represented here with a ceramic life mask she made of herself, alongside another she crafted for her husband, the architect Albert Lanier. A third of Asawa’s life masks, representative of the hundreds the artist made of clay throughout her lifetime, casts Buckminster Fuller in bronze. The teacher, mentor and geodesic dome-maker became a lifelong friend to both Lanier and Asawa when they were students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

That Was Then and This is Now III (Self-Portrait)
That Was Then and This is Now III (Self-Portrait), Mildred Howard, 2009 NPG © 2009 Mildred Howard

Other portraits making their debut at the museum include: Betye Saar, the 97-year-old assemblage artist, portrayed in a striking 2012 photograph by Michele Mattei; the fine art photographer Ming Smith—whose work influenced the Beyoncé photographer Mitchell—sitting for a 1972 portrait by Anthony Barboza; and, in a 1971 photograph by Melinda Blauvelt, the self-taught Southern artist Nellie Mae Rowe posing with some of her fanciful work in front of her home in Vinings, Georgia.

Saar’s curly gray hair in Mattei’s portrait is at one with the leafless tree branches she holds in front of her. “It has a pensive quality,” noted Saar, reflecting “my love of nature and of symbols.” It is one of two Mattei works in the show: She also photographed a vibrant 2003 portrait of the dancer, choreographer and teacher Carmen de Lavallade in mid-leap, her red dress swirling behind her.

Betye Saar, Michele Mattei, 2012 (printed 2018)
Betye Saar, Michele Mattei, 2012 (printed 2018) NPG, © Michele Mattei

Other notable photographs in the exhibition include a pleasant 2003 black-and-white portrait of astronomer Vera Rubin by Mariana R. Cook, originally taken for the publication Faces of Science, and Joan Roth’s 2022 portrait of Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman to be ordained by a rabbinical seminary. As such, Priesand is also the first woman rabbi to be featured at the Portrait Gallery. The photograph was commissioned by the museum and taken to mark the 50th anniversary of Priesand’s ordination.

The other museum commission, from Chicana artist Carmen Lomas Garza, depicts geologist Walter Alvarez in quite a different medium—cut copper, with a steel support and brass screws. According to Garza’s website, it was up to her to choose whom she wanted to depict; the museum’s only request was that it be in a copper cutout format. Garza chose the scientist, a geologist at the University of California at Berkeley, who along with his father, Luis, first posed the theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs after an asteroid the size of San Francisco catastrophically impacted the Earth 66 million years ago.

Rabbi Sally Priesand, Joan Roth, 2022
Rabbi Sally Priesand, Joan Roth, 2022 NPG, acquired through the generosity of Rabbi Amy and Gary Perlin

One of the most remarkable works in the group of “Recent Acquisitions” is also one of the newest—a 2023 oil of Opal Lee, the 97-year-old retired teacher and activist who spent years on her successful campaign to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In the large portrait by Texas painter Sedrick Huckaby, Lee sits at her kitchen table—an ordinary person who took on an extraordinary mission, including an annual walk, to achieve her goal. Juneteenth was made the nation’s 11th federal holiday in 2021.

If a few of the portraits look old-fashioned, it’s because they date back around 100 years.

Opal Lee, Sedrick Huckaby, 2023
Opal Lee, Sedrick Huckaby, 2023 NPG, Sasha and Edward P. Bass, © Sedrick Huckaby

Among the oldest is a circa 1916 colorized studio photo of Black hair-care mogul Madam C.J. Walker by Addison N. Scurlock. The show also features a pair of early drawings: One is a 1929 portrait by Ruth Light Braun of the early Yiddish theater comic and actor Molly Picon; the other is a 1916 charcoal by Leopold Gould Seyffert of the acclaimed 19th-century concert pianist Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler.

But a modernist jolt comes in the self-portrait of artist, curator and critic Shigeko Kubota, who emerges in a five-minute video from the early 1970s in ghostly, colored images, or behind a rain of static and visual snow.

Walter Alvarez, Carmen Lomas Garza, 2019
Walter Alvarez, Carmen Lomas Garza, 2019 NPG, Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool, © Carmen Lomas Garza

Charlotte Ickes, the museum’s curator of time-based media and special projects, was one of the five organizers who helped to create the exhibition. Ickes was pleased to be able to obtain the Kubota work, which she first saw at the Museum of Modern Art. “Looking at the intersection of artistry and biography, I love that Kubota wore several hats,” she says. “She was an artist but also a curator. She was the video curator at the Anthology Film Archives, who wrote art reviews and criticism, and taught.”

The Japanese-born Kubota was a member of the art movement Fluxus in New York in the 1960s and was among one of the first to use Sony Portapak cameras as a kind of paintbrush in the early 1970s. She was also married to Nam June Paik, whose archives are housed in the adjacent Smithsonian American Art Museum, where his large installation Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii is a destination showpiece. The Portrait Gallery’s acquisition of her Self-Portrait helps define Kubota, who died in 2015 at age 77, as an artist with her own vision.

Madam C. J. Walker, unidentified artist, c. 1916
Madam C. J. Walker, unidentified artist, after Addison N. Scurlock, c. 1916 NPG, Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative Pool

The Kubota work exemplifies the expanded parameters at the Portrait Gallery, established by Congress in 1962 with a mandate to collect portraits of those who had significantly contributed to the country’s history, development or culture. Subjects also had to have been dead for a decade before consideration; until 2001, that is, when rules were changed to include the living. By 2008, the definition of portraiture had expanded to include video and film.

“We’re really striving to show the many ways a portrait can be and look like and come into existence,” Ickes says. “That’s an incredibly important part of our curatorial mission.”

“Recent Acquisitions” continues at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. through October 27, 2024.

Self Portrait, Shigeko Kubota, c. 1970-71 (still)
Self-Portrait (Still), Shigeko Kubota, c. 1970-71 NPG, Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative Pool, © Estate of Shigeko Kubota

The Kubota work exemplifies the expanded parameters at the Portrait Gallery, established by Congress in 1962 with a mandate to collect portraits of those who had significantly contributed to the country’s history, development or culture. Subjects also had to have been dead for a decade before consideration; until 2001, that is, when rules were changed to include the living. By 2008, the definition of portraiture had expanded to include video and film.

“We’re really striving to show the many ways a portrait can be and look like and come into existence,” Ickes says. “That’s an incredibly important part of our curatorial mission.”

“Recent Acquisitions” continues at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. through October 27, 2024.

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Roger Catlin

Washington, D.C. freelancer Roger Catlin has written about the arts for AARP The Magazine, The Washington Post and other outlets. He writes mostly about TV on his blog rogercatlin.com.