“Before You Now” features work by 56 artists who employ photography, prints, drawings, installations and video to depict themselves, their identities and, especially, their artistic perspectives. Rather than creating traditional self-portraits, these symbolic, conceptual and occasionally humorous images express the artists’ deeper personas.

The artists whose self-portraits are displayed range from the relatively unknown to superstars. The latter include Diane Arbus, whose photograph Self-portrait in mirror (1945), taken when she was 22, beautiful and shapely, is a nude depiction of her with a soulful expression, holding onto a large camera. The photo reflects the artist’s lifetime of documentary-style work, in which she confronted and exposed the deeper nature of her subjects, many of them living complicated lives, as Arbus did.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1988) appears as a traditional self-portrait. The backstory is that it was shot by his brother Edward, just a few months before he died from AIDS-related complications, as he was too weak to photograph himself. A closer look at the image, which depicts the artist’s head floating in a sea of black as he clutches onto a cane, is perhaps prescient of the fate awaiting him. While Mapplethorpe did not shoot the photo, he apparently directed it, as it reveals his expertise in creating black-and-white celebrity pictures—one of his artistic specialties.

June Wayne, who founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (first in Los Angeles, later in Albuquerque), created the lithograph Noon Self (1973). The semi-abstract image depicts her lightly illuminated face floating in an ethereal background, with her hair like a halo—surprising details for the normally well-groomed Wayne. With her eyes and brows darkened, the self-portrait combines the artist’s intense creativity—illustrated by her graceful face, hair, and background—with her darker eyes representing her grounded, no-nonsense approach to her lithography business.

Roger Shimomura, Kansas Samurai, 2004. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of artist. © Roger Shimomura. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Included, too, is the lithograph Kansas Samurai (2004) by the lesser-known Japanese American Roger Shimomura, who’s still alive at 84 years old. The traditional-styled artwork presents a fierce sword-wielding samurai with eyes blazing and drawings of 1950s-era comic book characters in the background. Shimomura and his family relocated to a Japanese internment camp during World War II when he was only two years old. Facing racial and cultural stereotyping throughout his life and being an avid collector of American comic books who later taught art at the ethnically myopic University of Kansas, Shimomura drew on his life experiences to create Kansas Samurai. The Japanese wood-block style print of himself in traditional samurai costume reflects the intense, proactive attitude he assumed to succeed in an often-hostile world.

Other artists whose figurative, abstract, and conceptual self-portraits grace this exhibition include Nancy Buchanan, Marisol, Ed Moses, Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Patssi Valdez and Andy Warhol.

“Before You Now” (with work loaned by the L.A. County Museum of Art) reveals the artists’ diversity of perspectives and approaches to life and art, as few other group exhibitions can. The catalog explains, “The exhibition aims to broaden the topic to include those whose imagery leans into autobiographical narratives rather than functioning as traditional self-portraiture.”