ON VIEW: July 2025 – October 2025

This spring, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts unveiled our Portrait Hall, a newly dedicated space celebrating the art of portraiture. Unlike other galleries organized by geography or culture, this second-floor passageway showcases a single artistic tradition, offering visitors an inspiring encounter with some of UMFA’s most treasured paintings and sculptures.

To complement the Portrait Hall, we’re transforming our education gallery into an art lounge this summer! In collaboration with the J. Willard Marriott Library, we’ve curated a selection of books on portraiture, providing a deeper dive into this genre.

We invite you to visit this space and reflect, relax, and learn more about one of art history’s most enduring themes.

As you explore the rest of the UMFA, be sure to visit Barkley L. Hendricks’ striking life-size portrait of William Corbett (1975), on loan from the Art Bridges Foundation.

Below you can see the list of books selected for the UMFA Art Lounge with generous assistance from J. Willard Marriott Librarian Allyson Mower.

ACME Lounge Portraits book list

• Look at Me! by Claudia Strand
• How to Read Portraits
• by Kathryn Calley Galitz
• Reframing the Black Figure by Ekow Eshun
• Facial Expressions by Mark Simon
• How to Draw Faces and Portraits for Beginners by Leia Bloom
• Draw Amazing Faces by Pypah Santos
• Black Out by Asma Naeem
• Portrait of a Nation from the National Portrait Gallery
• Face Value by Brandon Brame Fortune, et al.
• Old Masters Rock by Maria-Christina Sayn-Wittgenstein Nottebohm
• Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids by Alice Proujansky
• 101 Art Book: Portrait Edition 2025 (A Collection of Portraits by 101 Artists from Around The World) by Charuka Arora
• Portraits: A First Discovery Art Book by Scholastic
• How Artists See People by Colleen Carroll
• Lee Greene Richards from the UMFA Catalog, 1994
• The Boy Who Loved to Draw: Benjamin West by Barbara Brenner
• A First Look at Art: Portraits by Ruth Thomson
• Hello, Fruit Face: The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo by Prestel Adventures in Art
• Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun: The Odyssey of an Artist in the Age of Revolution by Gita Mays
• Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick by Aimee Ng
• Making Faces: Self Portraits by Alex Katz by John W. Coffey
• Portraiture by Shearer West, Oxford History of Art series
• Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian by National Gallery London
• The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: “A Little Business for the Eye” by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale)
• Gilbert Stuart by Carrie Rebora Barratt
• Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World by Jean Borgatti and Richard Brilliant

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