PHOTO PROVIDED Ceremony, 2023. Archival pigment print. 40 × 50 in. Installation view, The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian.

WASHINGTON, DC — Former Clinton County resident Vikesh Kapoor, son of the late Dr. Sarla Kapoor, who delivered thousands of babies in the area during her life, will give a solo artist talk at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday, July 15, in conversation with Charlotte Ickes, the museum’s Curator of Time-Based Media and Special Projects.

The talk is based on a piece, Ceremony (2023), that draws on a long-running project of Kapoor’s, which focused on his parents’ 1973 immigration from India and the impact they had on Lock Haven and the surrounding rural community.

In Ceremony (2023), Kapoor stages a portrait of his mother and her absence. The photograph depicts a private ceremony held at his family’s home in rural Pennsylvania. In an act of memorialization, he reconstructed the scene the morning after his mother’s funeral.

The piece sits within “See You at Home,” Kapoor’s long-running project about his parents’ 1973 immigration from India. Ceremony is on view at the National Portrait Gallery through Aug. 30.

“The talk frames a conversation about ceremony, the objects we leave behind and what a portrait asks of us when someone is gone,” says Kapoor.

Ceremony has been featured twice in The Washington Post, in its Jan. 30 review of the exhibition and its June 12 “On Exhibit” feature.

The Outwin 2025 exhibition has been on view largely without the descriptive wall text artists traditionally write to accompany their work, as reported by The New York Times in May. Kapoor’s artist talk will be the first occasion for him to speak the work’s full context in his own voice.

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” presents 34 portraits by 35 artists, selected from more than 3,300 entries to the National Portrait Gallery’s seventh triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The triennial is established to highlight contemporary artists working in portraiture who push to expand preconceived notions of the centuries-old genre. The exhibition is co-curated by Taina Caragol, the Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Painting, Sculpture, and Latine Art and History, and Charlotte Ickes, the Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Time-Based Media and Special Projects. First-prize winners from previous editions include Amy Sherald (2016) and Hugo Crosthwaite (2019).

About Vikesh Kapoor

Vikesh Kapoor is an interdisciplinary artist from rural Pennsylvania whose work explores the mythos of the American Dream. He works across photography, moving image, music and poetry.

His photographs have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, as part of The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today; Aperture Foundation, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; The Print Center, Philadelphia; Filter Space, Chicago; Houston Center for Photography, Houston; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; and SF Camerawork, San Francisco.

He is a 2026 PhotoWork Foundation Senior Fellow and recipient of the 2026 Film Photo Award Visionary Project Award. He has also received the Google Image Equity Fellowship, Silver Eye Keystone Fellowship Award, Daylight Photo Award, The Hopper Prize, and a Project Development Grant from CENTER. He has been an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project, Latitude Chicago, and the Center of Photography at Woodstock.

His poems have appeared in The Normal School. He is a VONA 2025 Fellow and an alumnus of the PEN America Emerging Voices Workshop and Tin House Summer and Winter Workshops.

His songs have been featured in The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, and The Guardian. He was invited to write and perform a song in memory of Howard Zinn at his memorial service at Boston University, alongside prominent civil rights activists.

He is based in Los Angeles.

About See You at Home

Vikesh Kapoor’s parents immigrated from India in 1973, part of the first significant wave of South Asians to settle in America following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. They chose a small town of 10,000 people in rural Pennsylvania. See You at Home centers on family, memory, and the myth and melancholy surrounding the American Dream: the liminal space they have inhabited since leaving India, where the pursuit of freedom also produced isolation, and where collectivism gave way to individualism. The project is built from contemporary photographs of their life in Pennsylvania, imbued with memories of their past: family album photographs, stills from VHS home videos, and love letters. It also quietly examines what it means to have made it in America; the accumulation of a life, the objects that remain, and what is tended to long after its purpose has passed. We are just now beginning to see this generation reach old age. What does the pursuit of the American Dream look like at the end of life?

About The Outwin Boochever

Portrait Competition

Established in 2006, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is organized by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, and invites artists living and working in the United States and its territories to submit work for consideration by a panel of experts. The competition is held every three years. The competition and exhibition are made possible by the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Endowment, established by Virginia Outwin Boochever, a longtime docent at the National Portrait Gallery.