Published September 04, 2016 by Doug Cook

Boston Globe Art Critic: Museum of Art’s ‘Richly Stimulating’ Portrait Show Asks Questions of Identity

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), “One Portrait of One Woman,” 1916, oil on composition board. Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, bequest of Hudson D. Walker from the Ione and Hudson
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), “One Portrait of One Woman,” 1916, oil on composition board. Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, bequest of Hudson D. Walker from the Ione and Hudson

Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee recently visited the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and its This is a Portrait If I Say So exhibition, writing that it is “richly stimulating” in his review “Questions of Identity at Bowdoin.”

“The Bowdoin show makes us rethink not only portraiture but identity,” writes Smee. “What makes a self? Is it, in fact, a function of identity, in the contemporary sense of ‘identity politics’? Or is it something more slippery, layered, sly, and unknowable?” Read the Boston Globe review in its entirety.