exhibits Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue March 25 – September 25, 2022 National Portrait Gallery The June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Complex quickly escalated to a political and legal crisis that reached the highest levels of the United States government—including President Richard Nixon. The word “Watergate” came to mean the burglary itself, the subsequent cover-up of White House complicity, and President Nixon’s use of federal agencies to obstruct justice. The media’s relentless, razor sharp focus on Watergate culminated in the summer of 1974. Time magazine devoted forty Watergate-related cover stories—and portraits—to the scandal. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, this exhibition of photographs, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection brings visitors face-to-face with the scandal’s cast of characters. Portraiture and visual biography combine to present us a new window through which to consider the questions raised by the crisis and its fallout. Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part March 3 – June 26, 2022 Museum of Contemporary Photography Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part advocates dialogue and solidarity across the spectrum of experiences of global artists of color and Black diasporic artists. Two exhibition concepts and their interchangeable titles intertwine as one, breaking with more frequent traditions of ethnically separated and disconnected
exhibition spaces in museology and the art world. As a global forum, Beautiful Diaspora considers contemporary art as central to the portrayal of expansiveness—beyond a single-country scope, political commodity, or compressed narrative. This beautiful expansiveness exists as a testament to human spatial wandering and assertion, existing beyond assumptions and boundaries. You Are Not the Lesser Part challenges the pervasive social casualness of assigning bodies and identities to the category “minority” (quite a misimagining). Neither negligible
The media’s relentless, razor sharp focus on Watergate culminated in the summer of 1974. Time magazine devoted forty Watergaterelated cover stories— and portraits—to the scandal.
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon / Marisol Escobar / 1972, Pink marble and pigment / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine /© Marisol Escobar / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY
we categorize the way that we do—within museums exhibitions, but also in the world outside. This group of artists by many conventions isn’t one that would usually be shown together under identity concepts. The visual conversation among these fifteen artists defies the
nor small, the significance of our presence is not the lesser part of anything. The description word “minor” does not match our fullness, agency, and dreams. There’s a desire to encourage deep thinking about parallel experiences and relationships between global artists of color and diverse Black artists. Part of the goal of the two titles is that museum visitors are invited to be active in thinking through different ways individual artists and artworks may fit together, or why it might be assumed that they don’t fit. This exhibition is asking people to consider why ArtDiction | 12 | January/February 2022
Johny Pitts, student protest, Rome from the series Afropean, 2010-2020.
