Online for less than a year, Face-to-Face is written by a team of National Portrait Gallery staff members with diverse responsibilities, from web design to curatorial. The blog is "dedicated to art, history, and the telling of American lives." There are four categories on Face-to-Face: Biography, Events, Exhibitions and News. "Biography" currently features an article series on presidential trivia,...

Everyone's abuzz about Cindy Sherman - her current retrospective at MoMA was reviewed in the Arts sections of the "New York Times" on February 23rd, she's in the February 27th "New Yorker," and was even mentioned in the "Wall Street Journal" on March 5, in an article by Pia Catton, who admits to being skeptical of Sherman's elevated status in the art world. So it's a good thing that we can all use...

This exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery examines attitudes towards sexuality and difference in American art from the late 19th century to the present. Some of the artists in the show are homosexual; some are heterosexual; and the sexuality of the subjects of the works varies as well. As one of the curators, Jonathan Katz, says, "it's impossible ... to weed gay from straight in the...

The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has a new search interface that allows searching across over 80,000 portrait records. Four slightly overlapping search methods are provided, but the interface itself stays largely the same - portrait sitters' names can be combined with artists' names, medium, dates, and other criteria, such as the sitter or artist's distinction; whether they were...