HIDE/SEEK, the stand-out exhibit that provoked controversy when it opened at the National Portrait Gallery in October 2010, has found a new home at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The show, the first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of gender and sexuality in modern American portraiture, presents over 100 works by 67 artists, with almost all of the works from the original exhibit on display.

HIDE/SEEK opens with Thomas Eakins’ 1892 photograph of a geriatric Walt Whitman (whose relationship with Peter Doyle is well known) and closes with several versions of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, the film that ignited the controversy with the Smithsonian Institute due to its depiction of a crucifix covered in ants. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Glenn Ligon, Georgia O’Keefe, and Marsden Hartley are some of the artists in this high-caliber exhibition that asserts the significance of the work of gay artists to contemporary art, and presents a new paradigm for understanding the complex and tense relationship between sexuality and portraiture. Click through for a slide show of some of our favorite work on display. Read More »

American Gothic, Grant Wood’s portrait of a farmer and his unwed daughter in the agrarian Midwest, is one of America’s most famous paintings. The dour visages and stark, Northern Renaissance-influenced style ushered in the Regionalist period later parodied through the ages of pop culture. And now, it’s back, this time not just spoofed, but completely ripped off in a three-dimensional version called “God Bless America” in Chicago’s Pioneer Plaza. Whether you see Wood’s original painting as a satire of repressed Midwestern society or a glorification of its moral virtue, we doubt any of the visitors posing for pictures aside the sculpture are analyzing it much at all. Though perhaps, in the grand scheme of public art, that’s not such a bad thing. Read More »