Brenda Zlamany

The Itinerant Portraitist 2011–2021

July 10th -September 18th, 2021

Closing Party: Saturday, September 18th, 2021 7-10 PM

Upstate Art Weekend: August 27th-29th, 1-10 PM

Special Event: During Upstate Art Weekend, Brenda Zlamany will be in the gallery painting visitors. Each painting takes forty minutes to an hour. These portraits will become part of the exhibition. Portrait sessions will take place between 1 and 4 PM on August 27th–29th, and are by appointment only. To schedule an appointment please contact the gallery at TheReInstitute@gmail.com.

The Re Institute is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Brooklyn-based artist Brenda Zlamany. The Itinerant Portraitist 2011–2021 brings together watercolors, photography, and video from a decade of issue-driven portrait excursions, presented for the first time as a group in a site-specific installation in a massive hayloft gallery. Oil paintings of birds by the artist will also be on display in the smaller “aviary” gallery.

Zlamany is best known for portraiture that combines the techniques of the Old Masters with a postmodern conceptual approach. She gained attention in the 1990s when critics identified her among a group of figurative painters reviving the neglected legacies of portraiture and classical technique by introducing confrontational subject matter, psychological insight, and social critique.

In 2011 Zlamany created an ongoing, multi-year project called The Itinerant Portraitist. In this project, she travels the globe to explore the positive effects of painted portraiture. Stories are at the heart of The Itinerant Portraitist, and the artist records video of conversations with the subjects while simultaneously painting the portraits. At the end of the sessions, the subjects are photographed presenting their portraits. These photos are used to create community on social media and are displayed in installations along with the video recordings.

Zlamany describes The Itinerant Portraitist as an issue-driven project that changes focus with each chapter: "This project allows me to explore critical social issues and has given me opportunities to collaborate with various communities, filmmakers, and musicians. My watercolor portraits are always done from direct observation in a single sitting with the subject present, unlike my oil paintings, which I make over months from a combination of sketches, photos, and sittings. While my oil paintings benefit from slow, painstaking discovery, watercolor, an unforgiving medium, is best when one homes in on a few key events with speed and confidence. Each painting represents a relationship. The project is as much about art-making as it is about the experience and the connection with the subject.”

The inaugural chapter of The Itinerant Portraitist was 888: Portraits in Taiwan, funded by a Fulbright fellowship in 2011. Over the course of the fellowship, Zlamany traveled in Taiwan, primarily to aboriginal villages, and persuaded 888 people to sit for watercolor portraits. Subsequent chapters of The Itinerant Portraitist have involved portraits of girls in an orphanage in Abu Dhabi (2013), concertgoers in Oxfordshire (2013), artists in Brooklyn (2015–2016), taxicab drivers in Cuba (2016), elderly and disabled adults in a nursing home in the Bronx (2017), people affected by climate change in Florida, California, and Alaska (2018-2019), visitors to the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia (2019), and, most recently, socially distanced mask wearers in upstate New York (2020–2021).

Individuals, old and young, from all walks of life, have participated in The Itinerant Portraitist, including political figures, diplomats, tribal leaders, policemen, firemen, teachers, students, artists, street cleaners, fruit sellers, doctors, hotel workers, drag queens, fishermen, vintners, seasonal workers, realtors, climate scientists, victims of wildfires, park rangers, sled dog trainers, bus drivers, and Iñupiat whalers, as well as art world luminaries and other celebrities such as Alex Katz, Dawoud Bey, Deborah Kass, Émilie Simon, and Annie Dillard.

Since 2011, Zlamany has completed over 2,000 portraits with The Itinerant Portraitist, and individual chapters of the project have been presented in a range of venues worldwide. The Itinerant Portraitist 2011–2021 brings together over 400 of these portraits, displaying selections from every chapter of the project in one gallery for the first time. The exhibition also includes a digital presentation along with screenings of the artist’s 2019 documentary “100/100 ITINERANT PORTRAITIST” and of “Project 888,” an interview with the artist recorded by The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei in 2012.

Since 1989, Brenda Zlamany's work has appeared in over a dozen solo exhibitions—including in New York City at Laurie M. Tisch Gallery (2018), Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection (2017), Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (2012), Jonathan O’Hara Gallery (2007), Galapagos Art and Performance Space (1999), Stux Gallery (1998), Jessica Fredericks Gallery (1996), and E. M. Donahue Gallery (1994, 1992, and 1991) and elsewhere at the Studios of Key West (2019), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei, 2012), Sabine Wachters Fine Arts (Brussels, 1995 and 1994), Galerie Quintessens (Utrecht, 1994), and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, 1989)—as well as in many group shows in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Museums that have exhibited her work include the Susquehanna Art Museum (Harrisburg, 2018), the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, 2018 and 2006), the National Museum (Gdansk, 2007), the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2001 and 1995), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, 2002), Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, 2000), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (1999), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1997), and the New-York Historical Society (1991).

Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, the New Yorker, the New York Times, ArtCritical, Artnet, the Taipei Times, and elsewhere and is held in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, the Museum of Modern Art (Houston), the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the World Bank, and Yale University. Zlamany has collaborated with authors and editors of the New York Times Magazine on several portrait commissions, including an image of Osama bin Laden for the cover of the September 11, 2005, issue, a portrait of Marian Anderson for an article by Jessye Norman (1996), and a portrait of Jeffrey Dahmer for a special issue on evil (1995).

Awards she has received include a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for her project “Climate in America” (2018), a Fulbright Fellowship for “Creating a Portraiture of the Indigenous Inhabitants of Taiwan” (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2006–2007), a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship in painting (1994), and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship at the Printmaking Workshop, New York City (1981–1982). She has held residency fellowships at Denali National Park (2019), Chalk Hill Vineyard (Sonoma, 2019), King Abdulaziz Camel Festival (Riyadh, 2019), ADAH (Abu Dhabi, 2013), Ucross Foundation (1999 and 1987), Yaddo (1997), MacDowell Colony (1995, 1992, and 1986), Triangle Artists’ Workshop (1990), Millay Colony (1988), and elsewhere. Among her public commissions are The Davenport Dining Room Scene (2018), a large-scale group portrait permanently installed at Yale University. Her commissioned portrait of Yale’s first seven women PhDs (2015) is permanently installed in the university’s Sterling Memorial Library. She is currently working on a large-scale portrait of five diverse historical women scientists for Rockefeller University, to be unveiled in 2021.

Screenings:

Project 888. 2012

The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei

Runtime: 10 minutes

This interview was recorded and edited by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, on the occasion of Brenda Zlamany's exhibition Project 888 (2012). The exhibition documents the adventures of Zlamany and her ten-year-old Mandarin-speaking daughter as they traveled in Taiwan and persuaded 888 people, mostly indigenous inhabitants, to pose for portraits. In the interview, Zlamany describes her artistic process: meeting people and creating bonds with them, her daughter serving as interpreter and fellow "head hunter"; painting watercolor portraits with a camera lucida while in homes, in places of business, and on the street; and asking the subjects to pose for a second portrait, in which they present their painted image to the camera.

100/100 THE ITINERANT PORTRAITIST. 2019

Directors: Laure Sullivan and Brenda Zlamany

Runtime: 20 minutes

In 2017, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, NY, turned 100. To celebrate, Zlamany was invited to paint 100 residents, and 100 surprising, unique, and often inspiring stories emerged. This film focuses on the engagement between artist and subject. In this project, as with most of Zlamany's Itinerant Portraitist projects, Zlamany filmed herself and the subjects on an iPhone while simultaneously painting their portraits. Co-directed by Laure Sullivan. Original music by composer Aaron Kernis.

“100/100: The Itinerant Portraitist” was an official selection of Roving Eye International Film Festival (2020, Rhode Island); Reimagine: Life, Loss & Love (2020, online festival); Berkshire International Film Festival (2019); Greenpoint Film Festival (2019, awarded Best Documentary Short); and Joyce Forum Jewish Short Film Festival (2019, San Diego).