In Fall 2022, the Nationwide Portrait Gallery introduced Elsa María Meléndez as winner of the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competitors’s Individuals’s Alternative Award.
“The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Right now” presents 42 works (chosen from over 2,700 entries and that includes the 7 winners) “that foreground the vibrancy and relevance of portraiture right this moment.” Along with work, images, drawings, and sculptures, “The Outwin” contains video, efficiency artwork, and textiles, highlighting the limitless prospects of latest portraiture. The exhibition is now on view on the Orlando Museum of Artwork, Orlando, Florida, till October 8, 2023. It can then journey to Ackland Artwork Museum, The College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, November 3, 2023–January 21, 2024; and Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Tremendous Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, February 17, 2024–Could 5, 2024.
Right here is extra info on Elsa María Meléndez’s work.
The Smithsonian’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery has introduced Elsa María Meléndez of Puerto Rico as winner of the Individuals’s Alternative Award for the museum’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competitors. Held each three years, the Portrait Gallery’s nationwide competitors leads to an exhibition highlighting the newest in modern portraiture from throughout america and its territories. As a part of the competitors, the Portrait Gallery invitations viewers to vote for his or her favourite finalist included within the competitors’s ensuing exhibition. Viewers—each in-person and distant— have been in a position to forged votes on-line for his or her favourite of 42 portraits included in “The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Right now.” Meléndez’s successful textile work “Milk” (2020) stays on view in Washington, D.C., by Feb. 26, 2023, earlier than the exhibition excursions to pick cities throughout the U.S.
Created six months into the COVID-19 lockdown, “Milk” depicts Meléndez charging ahead in a large-scale portrait utilizing her personal likeness combining silk, drawing and numerous needlework methods. The determine carries a limp bull with milk dripping from her breasts in a touch upon gender violence which escalated in Puerto Rico in the course of the pandemic. Feminist organizations took to the streets demanding the federal government declare a state of emergency in response to a rise in home abuse in opposition to ladies. The milk reaffirms the power of ladies as a life power whereas the bull, tamed momentarily with breast milk, may be learn as a vital touch upon how ladies may “nurse the beast of patriarchy,” stated Meléndez.
“Our congratulations exit to Elsa María Meléndez whose portrait encapsulates the artist’s combat on gender equality,” stated Taína Caragol, director of the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competitors and curator on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery. “It’s also notable that the voters have acknowledged an art work that communicates the universality of the ladies’s battle for fairness and respect each in Puerto Rico and globally. That is the second consecutive time {that a} Puerto Rican artist wins the Individuals’s Alternative Award. We’re delighted for them and for all Latinx artists.” [. . .]
For extra info, see https://omart.org/exhibitions/the_outwin_american_portraiture_today/ and https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/national-portrait-gallery-announces-elsa-maria-melendez-winner-2022-outwin
Additionally see https://www.elnuevodia.com/corresponsalias/washington-dc/notas/bajo-exhibicion-en-washington-dc-una-obra-premiada-de-la-artista-puertorriquena-els
[Shown above: “Leche” / “Milk” by Elsa María Meléndez. Canvas with silkscreen, embroidery, ink, and other textiles. 2020Collection of the artist. Copyright Elsa María Meléndez.]