Robert Pruitt’s "Venus Williams, Double Portrait"

2022

Pruitt uses a mirror image of Williams in this double-figured portrait.

Robert Pruitt was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to create this portrait of athlete, entrepreneur, and pay equity activist Venus Williams. Created for the Gallery's 2022 Portrait of a Nation Gala in which Williams was an honoree, Venus Williams, Double Portrait combines realist portraiture with Afrocentric, fantastical imagery. A young Venus Williams faces the viewer confidently, her figure framed by a swirl of beads. An older version of her, wearing a Wimbledon plate as a bodice, forms a kind of near-mirror image. Pruitt’s portrait captures the “super, extra-human possibility” that Williams has embodied on and off the tennis court.