Peeking Behind the Curtain on Eye to I: Self Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery

The video above is a preview of the Eye to I exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. During these difficult times of COVID the arts are having to come up with creative ways to invite the public to view planned exhibitions that have now been isolated in their galleries.

The exhibition is very reflective of the current time we are in, quoting that “selfies and looking into a mirror are all that many of us can muster right now” and how some artists have looked at themselves in the past two centuries.

The preview opens on the modern photography of Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, who has used her own body to map out feelings of translocation from place to place.

The piece itself is peaceful and beautiful, offering the viewer a sense of wanderlust.

Untitled from the series When I am not Here, Estoy alla, 1996

Alice Neel Self-Portrait, 1980

As we continue to travel back in time with the short preview, another eye-catching piece is that of Alice Neil, who in 1980 created a self portrait that unapologetically expressed herself and her natural body. When recalling the process Alice said, "The reason my cheeks got so pink was that it was so hard for me to paint that I almost killed myself painting it." The self portrait itself took five years to complete, which leads me to believe that the artist took a long time contemplating on herself and her identity.

I believe that these two pieces especially challenge the stereotypes of the female body. The narrator explains while viewing the Alice Neel self-portrait that she quite clearly foreshadows the movement of modern day selfies that state the ‘this is me’ moment which invokes confidence to love our natural bodies and to challenge gender and body image stereotypes.