Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
No
Charles Ray American
Not on view
Ray often treats his body and identity as raw materials, deromanticizing the concept of "the artist" in the process. An example of what he has called a "sculptural photograph," No consists of a framed picture of a fiberglass mold of Ray’s head and torso embellished with a wig and clad in his own shirt and glasses. The picture was taken by a professional portrait photographer, and it adopts the gestures standard to the genre, recalling the kinds of stiff, staged images found in homes and break rooms around the United States. Notwithstanding the emphatic negation implied by its title, the work is not all artifice. As Ray has said, "No is exactly what it feels like to be me."
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