The four self-portraits exhibited here, made in the autumn of 2006 by students in Professor Lynette Stephenson's Art 231 (Painting I), stand at the intersection of personal introspection and art-historical appropriation. The student artists fashioned their self-images in the styles of certain 20th-century figurative painters represented in the Gallery's collection: Richard Diebenkorn, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, and Raphael Soyer. In a twist on the time-honored practice of copyists working directly from old master paintings on display in museums, the student artists studied original works at the Picker in order to produce new images of themselves.

To prepare for the project, each student selected an artistic exemplar, and then researched that artist's life and oeuvre. Next, the student scrutinized a mature work by this artist at the Picker, considering his or her distinctive approach to materials, composition, handling, palette, and technique. After imaginatively deconstructing the original works, the students selected specific elements from the earlier artists' works (while discarding others), and incorporated them into their own self-portraits. The new paintings comment on the examples of the students' illustrious predecessors (alongside which they are displayed) while projecting an image of the distinctive artists they hope themselves to become.