Taína Caragol, curator of painting, sculpture, Latine art, and history for the National Portrait Gallery, is the director of the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Taína is co-organizing the exhibition with Charlotte Ickes, curator of time-based media art and special projects for the Portrait Gallery. Caragol and Ickes, both notable advocates for underrepresented voices in art, bring an innovative curatorial vision to the exhibition, presenting an inspiring portrait of America’s social and cultural fabric through the distinct lens of modern portraiture.
"The Outwin 2025" invites viewers to engage with a powerful narrative on identity, representation, and the human experience, underscoring the Gallery’s commitment to elevating contemporary portraiture, reflecting individual likenesses of America itself, spotlighting innovative artists and diverse perspectives from across the nation.
States Represented In The Outwin 2025 Competition
Courtesy Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery
"The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today" will premiere at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., from May 3, 2025, through March 1, 2026, before touring to other cities in the United States. A ceremony announcing the order of this year's three prizes will take place at a press preview with the co-curators May 2, 2025, at 10 a.m.
"Since its inception, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition has presented the work of more than 275 contemporary artists to audiences in the nation's capital and across the country," said Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery. "The triennial competition is one of the many ways the Portrait Gallery is committed to supporting artists shaping the tradition of portraiture in the 21st century and to forwarding art's ability to help us navigate the diverse threads of the American experience of the past, present and ever-evolving future."
The first-prize winner will receive a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living person for the museum's permanent collection. Additional prizes in the amounts of $10,000 and $7,500 will be awarded to second- and third-place winners, respectively, for the 2025 competition.
Prize-winners whose commissioned portraits now reside in the museum's collection include 2006 winner David Lenz (sitter Eunice Kennedy Shriver); 2009 winner Dave Woody (sitter Alice Waters); 2013 winner Bo Gehring (sitter Esperanza Spalding); 2016 winner Amy Sherald (sitter former First Lady Michelle Obama); 2019 winner Hugo Crosthwaite (sitter Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.); and 2022 winner Alison Elizabeth Taylor (sitter to be announced).
"This year's competition saw a dramatic increase in the number of entries, with 600 more than in the last edition," Caragol said. "The works selected show how contemporary artists are exploring the relationships between portraiture, state power and surveillance, personal empowerment, devotional practices and cultural memory. The competition focuses on broadening the definition of portraiture in medium as well as subject area. This edition shows a bold questioning of figuration as a key to portraiture, with artists embracing abstraction, through composition, materials or technique."
"The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today" Artist List
ABOUT Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition
Established in 2006, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is organized by the National Portrait Gallery and invites artists (18+), who are living and working in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands to submit one portrait created in the past three years for consideration by a panel of experts. Selected artworks, including three prizewinners, are then featured in a museum exhibition.
Guest jurors for the 2025 competition were Carla Acevedo-Yates, the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Huey Copeland, the Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; LaToya Ruby Frazier, artist; and Daniel Lind-Ramos, artist. "The Outwin 2025" co-curators Caragol and Ickes also served on the jury with Rhea L. Combs, the Portrait Gallery's director of curatorial affairs.
The competition and exhibition are made possible by the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Endowment, which was established by Virginia Outwin Boochever, a longtime docent at the National Portrait Gallery.
The endowment is sustained by her family.
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery tells the multifaceted story of the United States through the individuals who have shaped American culture. Spanning the visual arts, performing arts and new media, the Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the nation's story.
The National Portrait Gallery is located at Eighth and G streets N.W., Washington, D.C.
Smithsonian Information: 202-633-1000.
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