QuintGallery.com

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has selected Lincoln Schatz’s 2008 commission for Esquire magazine, Portrait of the 21st Century for inclusion in their collection. The series of nineteen portraits, which includes George Clooney, Jeff Bezos and LeBron James, will be on view beginning Aug. 20 in the exhibition “Americans Now” through 2011.

Curators and historians at the National Portrait Gallery recommend to the museum’s commission (a board of 17 people who serve in an advisory role for the museum) a selection of objects portraying those who have made significant contributions to American life and culture. The works are chosen for their biographical and aesthetic impact and are created in a wide variety of mediums– paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs and video art.

Esquire’s anniversary issue, to be published in September, will examine the century that is just beginning, in part by profiling the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Esquire and Hearst commissioned the sculptor and new-media artist Lincoln Schatz to create a work that would unite many of these people in a single dynamic portrait. From May through September, Schatz will create dozens of individual portraits in his CUBE, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot translucent box fitted with 24 cameras that stream digital video to 24 computers. During each one-hour sitting, CUBE subjects are encouraged to represent their personalities, interests, and values in whatever ways they choose. Then, using thousands of these video files, Schatz creates a portrait made up of a randomized, perpetually evolving progression of overlapping images. Moored in the moment but never quite the same thing twice, Schatz’s “generative” portraits have an infinite ability to reconfigure perception and reorder time.

To view portraits and to learn more about the project select the following link: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/cube/