Recent events have pushed artists to visualize ideas of closeness in a new light. Kinship, published on the occasion of the National Portrait Gallery's tenth "Portraiture Now" exhibition, features the work of eight leading contemporary artists who explore familial relationships through photography, painting, sculpture, and performance. Contemporary portraiture offers a way to consider the mutable yet enduring qualities of familial relationships and the internal and external forces that affect our bonds with others. For example, interpretations of distance - whether emotional, physical, or geographical - have recently become more fraught. By recognizing the transformations that occur in the genre of portraiture and the threads that today's portraits share, we can better understand the universality and specificity of kinship. List of artists: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, Anna Tsouhlarakis

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of contemporary photography. From the seemingly objective, straightforward style and large-scale, vibrantly colored prints of famed Dusseldorf School photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff to works by groundbreaking contemporary artists, including Thomas Demand, Vik Muniz, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Catherine Opie, Photography Reinvented traces the aesthetic, technical, and philosophical shifts of the art form during a period of substantial change. Some of the artists, such as Sherman and Demand as well as Muniz and John Baldessari, explore the nature of photography as a medium that appropriates imagery from mass culture and other sources. Others, such as Hofer and Struth, have reassessed iconic works of art and architecture, revealing the relevance of the past in our present lives. And all of these artists have made large-scale prints that create new and strangely destabilizing experiences of space for their viewers. In an age when photography can no longer claim documentary veracity as its raison d'etre, Photography Reinvented examines the medium's redefinition, repurposing, and reimagining. Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington September 30, 2016-January 29, 2017