The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, has announced the winner of its 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The Brooklyn-based artist Kameron Neal, honoured for his two-channel video installation Down the Barrel (of a Lens) (2023), will receive $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection. Down the Barrel (of a Lens) will also be included in an NPG exhibition celebrating the prize, which features the works of this year’s 35 finalists (24 January-30 August).
“As the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition rounds the corner on two decades since its founding in 2006, it continues to highlight contemporary artists working in portraiture who push to expand preconceived notions of the centuries-old genre,” Taína Caragol, an NPG curator who helped organise The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, said in a statement. “The 2025 competition-based triennial invites visitors to explore how artists are engaging with portraiture, sometimes embracing its tradition and other times redrawing the boundaries of the genre, with the intent of examining what it means to be human.”
Neal’s winning work draws on his experience as an artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Records in 2021. There, Neal discovered thousands of reels of surveillance footage made by the New York Police Department of protests in the 1960s and 70s. Stored away and forgotten for decades, these hours of footage included images of Vietnam War protesters, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr and John F. Kennedy. In Neal’s project, he displays some of this footage on one screen, with the facing projection showing police setting up the equipment and filming each other.
Still from Kameron Neal’s Down the Barrel (of a Lens) (2023) © Kameron Neal, courtesy the artist
“I was specifically interested in this relationship between the person doing the recording and the people being recorded,” Neal told the journalist Christopher Kuo in a 2023 interview with The New York Times. “I really wanted to create a piece that felt like in some ways it was reimagining or re-creating those encounters, spatially. So as the audience member you stand between those two surfaces, you’re obstructing the gaze.”
This is a unique choice for the portraiture prize, whose past winners include Amy Sherald (2016) and Hugo Crosthwaite (2019). Sherald was the first woman and the first Black recipient of the award, which led to her commission to paint the official portrait of Michelle Obama. Crosthwaite, the first Latino artist to win the prize, later made an animated portrait of Anthony Fauci that recently came under attack for its “wokeness” by the Trump administration.
Second prize ($10,000) in this edition of the NPG competition this year goes to the photographer Jared Soares from Washington, DC, for his portrait of a Maryland man who was falsely accused of assault and theft after facial-recognition software misidentified him. The New York-based artist David Antonio Cruz was awarded third place ($7,500) for a painting of himself with one of his closest friends. Other finalists include the Chicago-based artist Edra Soto, the New York-based Mexican painter Aliza Nisenbaum and the Los Angeles-based photographer Philip Cheung.