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…
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From London, Gallery of Miniatures at the V&A
The dimly lit miniaturist’s gallery in the Victoria & Albert Museum enthralls us with its tiny likenesses, painted by artists called “miniaturists.” When viewed with a magnifying glass, these miraculously detailed masterpieces achieve a breathtaking three-dimensional quality. Viewing people from the past in such an intimate way magically transports the viewer into the past, when these tiny portraits were carried as tokens of love and affection, sometimes journeying thousands of miles to distant lands during an era of British exploration and expansion. Eventually, a few miniaturists traveled to those distant lands themselves. With a few miniaturists based in India, the exchange of portraits between Britain and India became cheap and easy.…
