Wimbley Featured in LACMA's UnFramed

Excerpt from LACMA Unframed Blog, Aug 22, 2025 https://unframed.lacma.org/2025/08/22/before-you-now-jessica-wimbley

Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture focuses on the enduring theme of the artist's self-portrait. The exhibition, now on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, presents a selection of photographs, prints, drawings, videos, and installation art, primarily by contemporary makers, drawn from LACMA’s collection. The over 50 artists featured in Before You Now contemplate their physicality realistically, highlight their persona through symbolic tropes, or utilize humor and conceptual methods to enlighten, exaggerate, or camouflage their reflective selves. All together, the work on view is a dynamic introduction to American artists as they see themselves—or as they want to be seen by the public.

To accompany Before You Now, LACMA has produced a series of video portraits introducing just a few of the artists and their works. In this video, artist Jessica Wimbley discusses her Cabinet Portrait: Wife Portrait (2022), which mimics the format and pose of a classic 19th-century photographic format known as a cabinet card while rejecting the typically diminutive six-by-four-inch scale. This kind of bridal portrait was key to the success of early studio photography, and with her self-portrait, Wimbley has contemporized the practice but literally scaled up the presence of Blackness in American material culture, while wearing a boldly non-traditional black wedding dress.

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