Here & Now

Me, Myself & I: Artist Self-Portraits from the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Chief Art Critic
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page N02

REALLY SERIOUS ART COLLECTORS are rare birds. Collectors of advanced contemporary art are even rarer. Contemporary collectors who focus on work by female artists barely exist. A collection of challenging pictures of those artists by the artists themselves is the ivory-billed woodpecker of the art world. You can see one now at the tiny downtown space called Curator's Office. Leading Washington collectors Heather and Tony Podesta, who generally specialize in contemporary art by women, are showing some of their holdings of female self-portraits at the little gallery. There are big names on view: There's a photo of Marina Abramovic, documenting a limit-pushing performance in which, among other acts of self-punishment, she cut a star into her stomach with a razor blade. There are also unknowns: Kathryn Cornelius, a barely emerging local artist, presents a series of stills from a video in which she's shown vacuuming a beach -- a housewife become Sisyphus.