Suffolk University Gallery

Susan White Brown is a Boston-based painter whose work often has some connection to the human figure. Though relationships among the portrayed figures vary with grouping and placement, each observer’s perception of their presumed identities is unique.

Laura Chasman draws her subject matter from and finds inspiration in her daily life—the people and the situations that she encounters. Intrigued by the way her subjects look, feel, and express themselves, she aims to capture the physicality and the spirit of the subjects in her work.

Daphne Confar is a painter whose relationship with her family—especially her relationship with her grandmothers, who would spend time with her and tell stories of their lives—fed her imagination and gave her a love of people and a love of people's stories that informs her work to this day.

Catherine Kehoe was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts, Boston University. Kehoe teaches painting and drawing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Colleen Kiely creates fictional portraits that synthesize imagination, found images, and a multitude of art historical sources to explore the fluidity of identity and time. Dressed in patterned clothing and set against a monochromatic field, the larger-than-life figures gaze at something, or someone, just outside the frame. Although each figure stands resolutely alone, collectively, they form a community.

The art of Keith Morris Washington investigates meaning and metaphor through landscape and portraiture. These landscapes and full-body portraits explore memory, identity, and social themes, that are latent and often obscured by visible features, cultural (mis)understanding, and time.

Among the many well-known portraits are those of Frida Kahlo, John Singer Sargent, Dominique Ingres, Rembrandt, Goya, and Velasquez. Contemporary examples include Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter, Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wilde, Amy Sherald, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Some well-known portrait painters from the past:

• John Singer Sargent
• Rembrandt

A portrait is typically understood to be a faithful reproduction of a person’s likeness. Rembrandt complicated the genre, constructing identities through props, lighting, and ambiguous settings—leaving us to ask, “What is a portrait?”

• Ingres
• Frida Kahlo
• Alice Neel

An American visual artist, Alice is known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.

• Amy Sherald
• Kehinde Wiley

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among others, Wiley, engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world.

• Kerry James Marshall
• Jordan Casteel
• Katy Grannan

“The circumstances of making my photographs are, in a way, almost more important than the pictures themselves.”

• Oliver Wasow

Wasow’s photographs have a strong relationship to painting, harking back to early photographic portraits which themselves were imitating paintings.

• Nan Goldin