Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self

Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, on view through May 10, 2026, explores how photography has been used throughout time as a medium of expression, reinvention, and challenging personal identity. The largest contemporary exhibition at the Gardner Museum to date, Persona features 83 works by 31 internationally-recognized artists from the 1920s to today. 

In our social media-driven society, self-portraiture is ubiquitous and easily manipulated with filters, AI, and editing tools. Persona spotlights contemporary work, such as Azra Akšamija’s holographic video animation and Cao Fei’s prints of her Second Life alter ego, examining the intersection of identity and digital culture and exploring how technology shapes our understanding of the self, blurring reality and fiction. 

The exhibition also features Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and others whose photography and conceptual art have long interrogated issues of gender and representation in film or the Western artistic canon. Their work is juxtaposed with historical references, such as Man Ray's Belle Haleine, featuring Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego, and Claude Cahun's surrealist, gender-fluid self-portraits. 

Works by Samuel Fosso, Yasumasa Morimura, and Yinka Shonibare demonstrate how artists can take on iconic figures or characters in order to address themes of race, power, and cultural hybridity. Some artists inhabit a persona as a form of play and discovery, while others hold a mirror up to the rituals and biases of society. From the theatricality of John Kelly's invented diva Dagmar Onassis, to Jamie Diamond’s series on the fantasy and expectations of motherhood, to Mariko Mori’s critique of the lack of opportunity for women in corporate Japan, the exhibition offers a rich and diverse tapestry of voices.

Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self was co-curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, and Melissa Harris, Editor-at-Large of Aperture Foundation. It includes loans from artists, museums, and galleries, as well as university and private collections.

The artists exhibited are: Hakeem Adewumi, Azra Akšamija, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cao Fei, Jamie Diamond, John Dugdale, Samuel Fosso, Lina Geoushy, Kahn & Selesnick (Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick), Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, John Kelly, Shigeyuki Kihara, Şükran Moral, Mariko Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Zanele Muholi, Narcissister, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Tomoko Sawada, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Tseng Kwong Chi, Wang Qingsong, Gillian Wearing, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. 

In addition to four images from her sequence I Promise to be a Good Mother showcased in Persona, Gardner Artist-in-Residence Jamie Diamond was commissioned to create a work for the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. On view through July 28, 2026, Monstra Te Esse Matrem (show yourself to be a mother) is the latest in Diamond's ongoing exploration of the persona of ‘mother.’ It features the artist holding a reborn doll, a lifelike silicone surrogate of an infant, while her two children hug her from behind.

These exhibitions are accompanied by Picturing Isabella in the Museum’s Fenway Gallery, which traces founder Isabella Stewart Gardner’s complicated and evolving relationship to her public persona and legacy.

Persona: Photography and the Re-Imagined Self and Jamie Diamond: Monstra Te Esse Matrem, 2026 are supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, the Barbara Lee Program Fund, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Picturing Isabella is supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter and Fredericka and Howard Stevenson.

The Artist-in-Residence program is supported in part by Lizbeth and George Krupp and The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc., and directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way.

Learn more about exhibitions at the Gardner Museum.

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