National Portrait Beauty Gallery

Displaying paintings of people has long been a way of demonstrating power. Visit a Western country’s national portrait gallery (or any museum with historical artworks), and you will see pictures of people with power going back centuries — cardinals, dukes, queens, popes, counts, bankers, presidents, and gentry of all sorts. The development of techniques for using paint (and charcoal/graphite) to make pictures is so closely linked to a history of power and wealth display that it can sometimes seem as though the medium’s origin and reason for being were locked away within that purpose.

People, paintings, and drawings, enmeshed though we are in systems of power and structures of dominance, tend also towards an undimmable radiance. Though we are constantly herded (or beaten) towards compliance with narrow structures of thought, body, and spirit, we exceed, repair, spill. We are brilliant.

Over the years, portraiture’s purpose and promise have broadened greatly. Painting and drawing have made their way out into a much wider and more diverse world of brush-holders (and pencil-holders). People are fascinating to people, and so portraiture lives on as a way of holding attention for a while on a friend, a heroine, a family member, a dog, an enemy, a pundit, a star, the self. These pictures might honor, grieve, ridicule, admire, document, play, love.

National Portrait Beauty Gallery offers a collection of portraits made by a coalition of artists working in different contemporary contexts, many of whom work in supported studios for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. These studios are places where people are coming together in peership, friendship, and allyship — making care structures that are also structures for opening the shades to let more brilliance into the world. We always have been, and we always will be, people who are connected to other people. It’s beautiful.

This exhibition takes place across two galleries: Studio Route 29’s Beauty Gallery, 62A Trenton Ave., and ArtYard’s Courtyard Gallery, 13 Front St., both in Frenchtown, New Jersey.