Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return

Always to Return examines Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work in relation to portraiture and accompanies a major exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 

This expansive project focuses on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s deep engagement with portraiture and the construction of identity, as well as how history is told and inherited. As one of the leading artists of the twentieth century, Gonzalez-Torres broadened the horizon of portraiture from a genre associated with static representations of individuals to one with the capacity to change, remain resonant, and encourage collaboration. With no formal beginning or end point, the exhibition and monograph unfold at the intersection of Gonzalez-Torres’s groundbreaking work, the context of two Smithsonian collections, and the historically significant setting of Washington, D.C. 

Always to Return weaves together documentation of the exhibition with new scholarship by the exhibition’s curators, Josh T Franco and Charlotte Ickes, essays by Julie Ault, and Joshua Chambers-Letson, and archival texts that shape the conceptual foundation for the exhibition. This in-depth look at the artist’s relationship to portraiture and historiography provides  a new way into the practice of one the most significant artists of our time.

The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cleveland Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Dallas Museum of Art; Glenstone Museum, Potomac; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

Always to Return is co-published with the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.