2,300 Obama portraits go on display at Detroit museum
"Once I commit to something, unless of course it's exercise, I'm pretty good at maintaining the commitment."
That's New York artist Rob Pruitt speaking earlier this week about his portraits of President Barack Obama — all 2,307 of them so far — that go on display Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The show marks the first time all of the paintings have been exhibited.
On the day that Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Pruitt made a 2-foot-by-2-foot painting of the president, based on a photographic image taken from the news and rendered in a subdued palette of washed-out red, blue and white. The next day he painted a second. The next day he painted a third. The next ... well, you get the idea. He doesn't plan to stop until Obama's final day in office. By then the Washington D.C.-born artist, who turns 51 on Sunday, will have made more than 2,900 portraits of Obama.
Now that's commitment.
"What I didn't imagine is the physical space they would take up, and that I would end up having a Manhattan mini-storage bill that I'd have to pay every month," he said.
On first blush, a cynic might dismiss the Obama paintings as a gimmick. After all, Pruitt earned a reputation early in his career as a provocateur, thanks to controversial exhibitions exploring gender and racial identity and a 1998 work, "Cocaine Buffet," that consisted of a 16-foot mirror with a line of real cocaine down the middle. Gadfly humor remains embedded in Pruitt's post-Andy Warhol ruminations on American popular culture — from Pruitt's well-known paintings of panda bears to his so-called flea market exhibitions and related eBay offerings where he sells off tchotchkes, secondhand items and the like.
The MOCAD show arrives as attention and acclaim for Pruitt are reaching another peak. Some critics have spotted an increasing maturity in his work, and there has been a flurry of international press attention surrounding the Obama paintings and various other activities.
The seriousness of Pruitt's latest project is clear from the moment you walk into the main MOCAD gallery. The paintings run floor to ceiling in an overwhelming, 360-degree sensory rush that drowns a viewer in what at first seems like a single abstract painting. As the eyes focus, however, the individual images, many vaguely familiar as if recalled from a dream, become clear. There Obama is meeting Pope Francis. There he is signing a bill. There he is dancing with the first lady, boarding Air Force One, giving a speech, playing basketball.
The works are in no particular order, so a youthful looking Obama often abuts a stressed-out Obama, his hair turning gray before your eyes. Bisecting the gallery is a newly built central wall with shelves that serve as storage for the more than 920 paintings that couldn't be squeezed onto the walls; during the show, gallery attendants will unwrap them for viewers to examine up close. New paintings created during the show will be filed away: No. 2,308, 2,309, 2,310 ...
As a whole, the paintings create not only a kind of cumulative portrait of Obama that documents his presidency but also capture the relentless march of time and the convoluted and complex mix of gravitas, banality and celebrity that defines American politics. From another vantage point, the photographic base of the paintings raises questions about currency and ownership of images in our digital age.
The repetition of the Obama paintings also recalls Warhol riffs on mechanical reproduction — except unlike Warhol's soup cans, Pruitt's paintings are each unique.
"I think there's also a comment here about American excess — like there are just so many that they have to be put on shelves," said MOCAD executive director Elysia Borowy-Reeder, who curated the exhibition.
"There are lots of ways to take the conversation. Some people read it as both critical and patriotic at the same time. People think about their own relationship to the president and government. I think great art poses questions; I don't think great art necessarily answers questions."
Also on display at MOCAD will be Pruitt's "The Lincoln Monument," an installation made from 200,000 pennies filling three stacked copper-painted truck tires.
A regular exercise
Pruitt, who described himself as "not a political person," said he nonetheless got swept up in the excitement of the first Obama campaign and started his paintings as a way of converting the pre-election energy he felt into a post-inauguration project. "One of the most exciting things was that he was a person of color and that hadn't happened before," said Pruitt. "It was a milestone."
Pruitt has always been drawn to the idea of regular artistic calisthenics; he and his studio assistants eat lunch every day on a rudimentary plywood table that they also draw on every day. When they run out of room every few months, they start on a new table. "I had a total infatuation with the 'Peanuts' comic strip as a kid," said Pruitt. "I used to tape them to my bedroom wall. I liked the seriality of that."
Each painting takes about an hour to make. Pruitt surfs Google News for images of Obama from the previous day's events and picks one that strikes his fancy. He digitally tailors the image to his liking and then creates a transparency that he projects onto the canvas as a guide. Each canvas has already been prepared by a studio assistant who, using a spray gun, creates an identical ground of gradient red to blue. Pruitt then uses a brush loaded with white paint to render the projected image in quick, gestural strokes. (He sometimes turns off the projector, too.)
"It's a great exercise because it demonstrates how we live in a reductive world," said Shepard Fairey, the Los Angeles-based street artist best known for his own widely reproduced "Hope" image of Obama.
"The president is a figurehead. He doesn't have that much control, but everything ends up coming down to whether he's to be credited or blamed. And I love the Rorschach idea that there's such an incredible breadth of interpretation to it."
Fairey, who said he respects Pruitt's ambition, even if he doesn't like every piece the artist does, will be arriving in Detroit this weekend to begin work on his largest mural to date — a 184-foot-by-60-foot design on the Gratiot Avenue and Farmer Street side of One Campus Martius (formerly known as the Compuware Building), owned by Dan Gilbert's Bedrock Real Estate Services.
For his part, Pruitt said he won't really know what the complete set of Obama paintings will mean until the project is complete. "I hope it finds people in Detroit who will be motivated and inspired by it," he said. "But if it isn't received well and goes back in boxes and storage, I'm used to failure in my artistic life, and that's fine. I grew up in D.C. surrounded by monuments and that's kind of what this is. It's part of who I am."
Contact Mark Stryker. 313-222-6459. mstryker@freepress.com
'Rob Pruitt: The Obama Paintings and the Lincoln Monument'
Today through Aug. 2
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Opens at 7 p.m. Friday. Music by Little Animal, Serengeti, Yoni Wolf begins at 9 p.m. Free until 9 p.m. $10 after 9 p.m. Members free.
Regular hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed., Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thu.-Fri.
4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit.
313-832-6622
www.mocadetroit.org
Free admission but $5 suggested donation.