Poignant portraiture:
There’s more to Museum of the African Diaspora exhibition, left, than meets the eye.
Visitors to the Museum of the African Diaspora may enter its just- opened exhibition, “Portraits and Other Likenesses From SFMOMA,” confident of recognizing a portrait when they see one, and leave with that confidence shaken.
This would probably displease neither MoAD nor the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which with this project notches another in its string of loan exhibitions to neighboring institutions during its extended closure for expansion.
Some things on view, such as African photographer Seydou Keïta’s untitled black- andwhite studio shot from the early ’ 50s, qualify intuitively as portraits. A sympathetic image of a dressed- up young man trying to act natural while holding an apparently artificial
Portraits and Other Likenesses From SFMOMA:
Paintings, sculpture, video, photographs and installations. Through Oct. 11. Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St., S. F. ( 415) 3587200. www. moadsf. org. flower shows him sitting before a backdrop of floral- patterned fabric. We learn nothing of the picture’s context, but it suggests a guileless collusion between photographer and sitter to make the latter appealing, perhaps as a suitor.
The picture’s status as a portrait seems to turn on the magnetism it exerts on a viewer beyond whatever sociological or documentary interest it may have.
That magnetism owes something to the work’s credibility as a record of an individual’s existence, not merely as a fact but as a factor in — a pressure upon — our sense of what marks a personal presence in the world.
Creative marks of identity take many forms besides pictorial or sculptural likenesses, or so argues the MoAD/ SFMOMA show. The exhibition includes a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” ( 2009), an elaborate costume with Afro- Caribbean aesthetic roots that conceals a wearer’s identity but makes attention- getting sounds with every motion.
The work looks nothing like Cave himself, but it and others he has made define a professional identity and serve as an autobiographical marker in that he first made one right after the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police in 1991, thinking of it as a suit of armor.
Thinking of contemporary painting at the time, John Berger remarked more than 50 years ago that the social function of a