• Pamela

    Out of Many, One

      What appears to be a single face, made from soil and sand across five acres, is a composite of 50 men between the ages of 18 and 24. Earlier this year, one of our favorite museums in the world — the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery — commissioned Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada, a Cuban-American artist, to create a giant earth portrait, a “facescape,” on a 900-foot by 250-foot plot on the Mall. He photographed the men at random in Washington, D.C. and then selected elements of each face – “the glint of an eye, edge of a mouth, someone’s lip texture” – for an image he created using Photoshop. They he turned…