WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced Brooklyn-based artist Kameron Neal as the first-prize winner of the seventh national Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Neal’s two-channel video installation “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” (2023) draws upon his time as a public artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Records, and it places the audience between two screens of declassified New York Police Department surveillance footage filmed between 1960 and 1980. As the first-prize winner, Neal will receive $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the museum’s permanent collection. “Down the Barrel (of a Lens)” will be on view as part of “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” exhibition, co-curated by the competition’s director Taína Caragol, the Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, and Charlotte Ickes, the Portrait Gallery’s curator of time-based media art and special projects.

Held every three years, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is dedicated to supporting the next wave of contemporary portraiture in the U.S. “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” will be on view at the museum Jan. 24 through Aug. 30, 2026. From the exhibition’s opening through April 5, 2026, visitors—in person and online—can vote for their favorite artwork to receive the People’s Choice Award.

Previous first-prize winners of the national competition include David Lenz (2006), Dave Woody (2009), Bo Gehring (2013), Amy Sherald (2016), Hugo Crosthwaite (2019) and Alison Elizabeth Taylor (2022).

Second prize for the 2025 competition was awarded to Jared Soares of Washington, D.C., for his photograph “Misidentified by Artificial Intelligence: Alonzo and Carronne” (2023), a portrait of a Maryland resident who was falsely accused of a crime and arrested based on facial recognition software. Third prize was awarded to David Antonio Cruz of New York City for his painting “isaiditoncebefore,butnowIfeelitevenmore_feelin’pretty,pretty,pretty” (2023). Part of the artist’s “chosenfamilies” series, the painting shows the artist with Archel, one of his lifelong friends. Soares and Cruz will receive $10,000 and $7,500, respectively.

“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,” Caragol said. “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.”

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” includes 34 portraits (by 35 artists) in mediums ranging from painting, photography and sculpture to immersive, time-based media installations. The artworks were chosen from more than 3,300 submissions to an anonymous open call, which was juried by experts in the fields of portraiture and contemporary art. The finalists include portraits by artists based in 12 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Jurors for the 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition were Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator, writer and member of the artistic team for documenta 16; Huey Copeland, the Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh; LaToya Ruby Frazier, artist; and Daniel Lind-Ramos, artist. “The Outwin 2025” co-curators Caragol and Ickes also served on the jury with Rhea L. Combs, the Portrait Gallery’s former director of curatorial affairs.

“The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today” will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog available at the museum’s store or online.