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 California State University, Northridge, presents a selection of photographs, prints, drawings, videos, and installation art drawn from LACMA’s collection primarily by contemporary makers. The over 50 artists featured in Before You Now contemplate their physicalities in realistic fashion, highlight their personas 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, Filipina American artist Stephanie Syjuco discusses her identity and her practice, including the series Cargo Cults, in which she revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture through fictional displays, with herself as the exoticized “ethnic” sitter. “I was thinking about how American colonial anthropologists took images of their Filipino subjects,” she says. “It’s a critical engagement of the trappings of ethnographic photography.” Learn more in the full video below.

Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture is now on view at California State University, Northridge, through December 5, 2024. It will then travel to the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (January 25–April 13, 2025) and the Vincent Price Art Museum (July 12–September 20, 2025).