At Home with Political Portraits

At Home with Political Portraits focuses on photographs of the domestic display of three U.S. presidential icons: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama to examine everyday expressions of national pride and belonging as well as tensions these displays signal about the state of democracy.Even though keeping political portraits in the home has traditionally been associated with authoritarian regimes, the United States has a long history with the practice, and Wingate analyzes how photos of three 20th- and 21-century U.S presidential icons plays into this history. With radio, television, and social media, respectively, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Obama entered the intimate spaces of people’s daily lives in new and unprecedented ways. Exhibiting presidential portraits at home was, and is, a patriotic and commemorative act. But the photographers and artists who draw our attention to these expressions of pride and belonging, such as Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Louis Carlos Bernal, Bruce Davidson, Jordan Casteel, and An Rong Xu, also reveal the tensions they signal. Wingate argues how both the artists and their subjects strive to make meaning from national symbols and to locate one’s place within the imagined community of nationhood. In doing so, they invite reflection on U.S. citizens’ hopes and anxieties about the state of the nation’s democracy.