Collisions in Portraiture highlights the ways in which artists and sitters use portraiture to reveal what happens when cultures collide. By analyzing portraiture, students will consider how cultural collisions are visualized from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Students will explore the powerful contributions to the history and culture of the United States through portraiture.

Objectives: After completing this lesson, students will be better able to: 

• Examine how modern and contemporary artists use portraiture to reveal aspects of a sitter’s individual, community/cultural, and national identity. 
• Identify key components of a portrait and discuss what one can learn about the sitter through these components. 
• Discuss the artistic choices that portrait artists make and consider how such decisions can reveal the artists’ viewpoints and also influence the viewers’ understanding of the sitters’ identity. 
• Use the museum’s collection as a gateway to investigating and exploring of the visualization of colliding cultures.

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Keywords

Portraiture, Collisions, Harriet Tubman, Civil War, Stonewall, Roger Shimomura, Chief Joseph, Robert Rauschenberg, United Farm Workers