Family Portrait

New York City

As the subject of „An American Family,“ one of television’s first reality shows, the Loud family exemplified the „Margaret Mead effect“ of the mediation of experience, where representation begins to influence behavior. Followed everywhere by cameras for seven months, emotional cracks and fissures developed from the constant surveillance, which peaked when Pat Loud asked her husband for a divorce on TV. Serving as a vehicle to represent and reproduce the values of society, the family is central to its psyche. Through television shows and advertisements, popular culture has combined to represent the family as central to „belonging,“ a unique group at the core of social obligation and order.

While the subject of the family has often been approached within art and portraiture in ways that either emphasize its traditional nature or attempt to counteract this tradition with challenges to its conservative reputation, the emphasis of the exhibition Family Portrait is on the manner in which the family’s image has been constructed and maintained over time, and how this might influence the shaping of the political and social spheres of everyday life.

Participating artists are: Olaf Breuning, Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Carol Irving, Mathias Kessler, Dorothea Lange, Servane Mary, Claes Oldenburg and Hans Op de Beeck.

carriage trade

October 19th – December 9th, 2012
62 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
USA

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