National Portrait Gallery show with Albuquerque artists opens amid anti-DEI crackdown

Works by two Albuquerque artists, Vicente Telles and Stephanie J. Woods, are currently on view at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum’s prestigious triennial exhibition, “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today,” which opened Saturday, Jan. 24.

The juried exhibition — a celebration of contemporary American portraiture — was previously set to open in October but was postponed after a federal government shutdown forced the closure of national museums. It now opens amid escalating tensions between the Trump administration and the Smithsonian Institute regarding diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Telles, who was excited to come to the October opening with his family, is currently out of the country and will no longer be able to attend.

“My experience with the actual (National Portrait Gallery) curators has been amazing, but the experience with moving the dates has been frustrating,” Telles said, “because now I am not able to attend something I’ve been dreaming about my whole life.”

Over 3,300 artists submitted work for the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition — the Outwin, for short — an endowed competition established by National Portrait Gallery docent and benefactor Virginia Outwin Boochever (1920–2005). Of these, 36 winners were selected.

Woods, who often makes installations with nontraditional materials, had not considered applying to the competition until 2019, when she attended that year’s exhibition with her friend Antonius-Tín Bui, who had a performance-based video work in the show.

“I thought that was really exciting,” Woods said. “That’s the reason I even applied, because I was like, Wow, they’re accepting video pieces and performance art? It seemed as though they would be really open to many different forms of portraiture.”

Woods’ portrait, titled “My Papa Used to Play Checkers,” features a Black subject’s hair, elegantly braided over a watermelon and adorned with beads and barrettes. The anonymous portrait subject wears a robe, hand-dyed by the artist to resemble a checkerboard. Woods said she uses watermelons in her work as a way of reclaiming an image associated with racist stereotypes and to remind viewers that the fruit had originally symbolized Black economic autonomy in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Woods arrived at her current practice of creating faceless, sculptural “portraits” after realizing that the inclusion of recognizable faces distracted audiences from her ideas.

“In 2012, I was showing more of the face, and I noticed that people were gravitating more to the identity of the individual, as opposed to larger narratives I was exploring in the work, like cultural symbols and narratives about identity,” Woods said. “Strangely, the solution to making the narrative more directed toward identity was to eliminate the identity of the individuals in the image.”

Telles’ portrait, titled “Cobija de Florecitas – Commodities” (“Blanket of Little Flowers – Commodities”), is also an “anonymous” portrait, featuring culturally loaded symbols. In Telles’ painting, the subject’s face is hidden under a burlap bag that once held pinto beans. Their shoulders are wrapped in a quilt that Telles’ grandmother made. Pigeons perched on the subject’s lap and shoulder also have their faces covered — in their case, by empty cans of government-issued pork and milk.

“Pinto beans are a vital source of protein but also became a term that was used in a derogatory way toward people who consumed beans and ate food that was different than ‘American’ food,” Telles said. “We were called beaners. But when I start talking about the derogatory terms that are used toward immigrants or people who have been here for generations, who are of Mexican, Latino or Nuevo Mexicano heritage, sometimes that conversation is a little difficult for people.”

Telles said he began incorporating images of pigeons into his work to help facilitate those tough conversations.

“What kind of language is used about pigeons? They say they’re flying rats, or they’re dirty, or they’re everywhere. It’s exactly the same terminology and language used against us as human beings,” Telles said. “So, that (allows us) to have conversations about … those kind of words that are used. And let’s talk about how we can be better human beings to each other and a little more aware of those people in our communities, who make our communities run, who are faceless.”

When the National Portrait Gallery opened in 1962, it focused on representational paintings of influential American men, but its collection has gradually expanded to be more diverse and inclusive, while also embracing a much wider range of media, including photography, video and performance art. The Outwin has been at the forefront of these changes, often showcasing portraits in nontraditional media by contemporary artists exploring the complexities of identity and what it means to be American from a wide spectrum of perspectives.

“The show has a lot of queer and brown people telling queer and brown people stories,” Telles said.

While such exhibitions have not been particularly controversial in the past, they have increasingly attracted the ire of prominent Republican politicians, including President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration has been publicly battling with the National Portrait Gallery and other Smithsonian Institute museums for months, with a White House official stating in August, “President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian.” 

“Woke,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.”

What the administration wants, according to Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer for The Guardian, is for “museums to reflect a MAGA vision of American history that (is) nationalist and triumphalist.”

In light of this larger political context, some Outwin artists, including Telles, have expressed concern that the long-postponed exhibition might be shut down after it opens.

“I’m excited for this (exhibition), but also kind of nervous,” Telles said. “If I’m being completely honest, I think the show is going to open, and then it’s going to be closed. That’s my projection … but we’ll see what happens.”

The National Portrait Gallery already made one apparent concession. After the White House announced in August that the Smithsonian would be required to submit all exhibition materials, including proposed wall texts, to be preappoved by government officials, the curators made the decision to forego explanatory wall texts altogether.

Woods and Telles had both crafted detailed descriptions of their portraits to give insight into deeper cultural meanings that audiences might otherwise miss. Woods’ description, for instance, highlighted the post-Emancipation meaning of the watermelon “as a fruit used by African Americans to enact and celebrate their freedom and property rights.” It also discussed the history of West African women braiding seeds and grains into their hair during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade “as a means of physical and cultural survival.”

“Once that description is not with it, it changes the work,” Woods said.

The artists saw the decision to present the art without didactic panels or descriptions as an unfortunate but necessary decision to ensure that the work would be seen at all.

“So, all these pieces … are there without any explanation — which is fine, as well, (because) art is meant to be interpreted by those who look at it,” Telles said. “Having an explanation would have been an amazing thing, but it’s not an option anymore.”

Telles hopes the meaning of his art will still shine through.

“These experiences of Nuevo Mexicanos like myself — and Latinos across this country — these are experiences that can’t be taken away. They can’t be whitewashed,” Telles said. “We’re here, we’ve always been here and we’ll continue to be here. … This (artwork) tells a story that’s one little snippet of one experience that hopefully will resonate with the experiences of Latinos across the country who get to see it.”

Woods, who plans to attend the opening, looks forward to seeing diverse perspectives highlighted on the national stage.

“I think it’s going to be really powerful to see,” she said.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.