Thursday, July 30, 2026
The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition was first held in 2006, the year after the death of longtime National Portrait Gallery docent Virginia Outwin Boochever, who endowed the program. On a three-year cycle, the seventh competition took place in 2025.
The top three winners, the People’s Choice and 30 other finalists are on view through Aug. 30 at the Portrait Gallery — which shares the Old Patent Office Building at Eighth and G Streets NW with the Smithsonian American Art Museum — in “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today.”
From over 3,300 entries, the Outwin jurors were tasked with selecting entries that “broaden the definition of portraiture and highlight the genre’s vital role in society and contemporary art.”
In 2025, both the first-prize winner and the People’s Choice were video projects, installed in facing galleries off the second-floor corridor where many of the works are hung. Others are displayed in a second pair of facing galleries and in a larger gallery at one end.
The top prize — $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait that will become part of the NPG collection — went to Kameron Neal for “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” of 2023. Playing on two screens on opposite walls to an organ-like drone, the 25-minute work splices together declassified surveillance footage recorded by the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations between 1960 and 1980. The wall text notes: “In 1985, a federal court found the city’s surveillance methods to be unconstitutional.”
Opposing views face off across the space. On one screen, a woman holds a sign reading “Racism has no place in New York/Abolish PAT,” referring to Parents And Taxpayers, a group fighting desegregation. On the other, a woman holds a sign reading “Commies crucify Lt. Gilligan.” Thomas Gilligan, an off-duty police officer, fatally shot a Black teen, James Powell, in 1964, setting off violent demonstrations.
Few viewers (including this writer, who only watched for a few minutes) will be able to identify the various assembled scenes, which segue with an audible click. It is a remarkable, eye-opening work, adroitly conceived and executed, but is it a portrait?
Across the corridor, the mood switches from sobering to festive. The five-minute People’s Choice winner, “Hebras y vejigantes” of 2023, is a group video portrait that animates, literally, a larger idea. The title means “Hair and Carnival Characters,” more or less. As a text is recited in Spanish, English subtitles move along 12 vertical screens, which form a nearly complete circle. An excerpt: “I do not know the roots of my ancestors but I feel their roots sprout from my follicles and through my pores.”
Created by a Puerto Rican duo, author Gloriann Sacha Antonetty Lebrón and artist Juan Pablo Vizcaíno Cortijo, the five-minute work surrounds viewers with rotating figures, dancing with colorful fabrics and carnival masks, reading, preparing a dish, having their hair done. On one screen, a woman wearing headphones (Antonetty Lebrón?) mixes the score of percussion, bass, synthesizer and chanting.
Suspended in the middle of the corridor is one of the show’s most powerful portraits, straightforward in that it portrays a single individual yet envelope-pushing in its format. Also with a Spanish title — the artist, Adrián Román, is a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent — “La caja de la memoria viva: Tite Curet Alonso” of 2024, “Box of Living Memory” in English, pays tribute to a salsa composer who died in 2003.
“La caja de la memoria viva: Tite Curet Alonso,” 2024. Adrián Román. Installation view. Photo by Richard Selden.
A charcoal drawing of Curet Alonso’s face fills one side of the box. The two adjoining sides show the sides of his head (mainly his ears). On the fourth is a pair of small house shutters. The viewer looks up into the box, which is open at the bottom, at artifacts mounted within: framed photographs and paintings, a Spanish newspaper, a wooden cross, a cassette player, a 45-rpm record, a notebook, a little model of a building with a full-size flag, a hat, a patterned cloth, a doll, a mask. From the piece — which brings to mind the assemblages of Betye Saar (who died last Sunday, a few days short of 100), inspired in turn by the boxes of Joseph Cornell — the sound of a man humming or singing seeps into the corridor.
Four other nontraditional works stood out for this visitor. “Entre (Between)” of 2023, by Sandra Bacchi, is a python-length strip of film with perhaps 200 black-and-white headshots, nailed to a wall in a drooping wave that terminates in a roll on a platform. “Entwined Repose” of 2022, by Katie O’Keefe, is a wall-mounted embroidered textile that depicts three partially nude women stretched out together in shades of red and brown. “We need you man…” of 2024, by Kevin Hopkins, is a pretzel-like construction of polyester-stuffed canvas, with a luggage handle bizarrely attached, through which peers a man with dreadlocks. Even less explicable, Daniel Terna’s “Isaac & Abraham” of 2022, from his “New Power Feeling” series, is a pair of industrial sneeze guards — looking like shower doors — with UV photographic prints of hands, a painting and a bust of a man on one and a man carrying a painting, its back to us, on the other.
“Entwined Repose,” 2022. Katie O’Keefe. Photo by Richard Selden.
Among the notable photographs: “Vlada and Ilona shelter in a Metro Station in Kharkiv, UA” of 2022, from Philip Cheung’s “Russian invasion of Ukraine” series; and “my papa used to play checkers” of 2022, a “head-on” view of a person facing away, wearing an intricately patterned and ornamented hairdo and a checkerboard scarf, by Stephanie J. Woods.
The second- and third-place winners were “Misindentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne” of 2023, Jared Soares’s photograph of a man in a hoodie with someone’s hands touching his chin, and David Antonio Cruz’s painting of an elaborately dressed man and woman, “isaiditoncebefore,butnowIfeelitevenmore_feelin’pretty,pretty,pretty” of 2024, from his “chosenfamilies” series, respectively.
Other striking painted and mixed-media works: referencing Indian art, Rupy C. Tut’s lovely “Portrait of a Woman” of 2023, in handmade pigments and shell gold on hemp paper; “Erin and Anya with Hydrangeas” of 2023 by LaToya Hobbs, an affectionate portrayal of (presumably) Hobbs’s daughters, painted in acrylics with collaged elements on a striated wooden panel; in a Native American style, “Bisháakinnesh/Stella (Self-Portrait)” of 2024 from Stella Nall’s “Offerings from My Heart” series, depicting a swan, a crying alligator, a deer and a woman on a bison in acrylic paint and beadwork on paper; and “On a planting moon, I release what broke me” of 2023 by Mar Figueroa, a complex and stylized acrylic painting, most likely a self-portrait, of a woman drawing at a desk in a cramped apartment.
Rupy C. Tut’s “Portrait of a Woman” of 2023 is on view in “The Outwin 2025” at the National Portrait Gallery. Photo by Richard Selden.
Not to be left out is a phenomenally photorealistic charcoal drawing that shows a young woman in cutoff shorts holding an inflated Dora the Explorer doll in front of her head and chest: “Verano 2002” of 2022, from Luisiana Mera’s “Dora Drawing” series.
In one of the rooms off the corridor is a video compilation of the grand-prize recipients and top-scoring selections from a nationwide Teen Portrait Competition launched by local students in 2022.
Bonus: On view next to “The Outwin 2025” is the exhibition “American Winners: Athletes and Entertainers Who Shaped the Nation,” featuring James Montgomery Flagg’s monumental 1944 painting of the Jack Dempsey-Jess Willard heavyweight championship of 1919. Other highlights include portraits of Tallulah Bankhead by Augustus John, Ginger Rogers — in pink Georgia marble — by Isamu Noguchi, Joseph Papp by Alice Neel and Clive Davis by David Hockney (both Davis and Hockney died in June).