On September 11, 2021, artist Hugo Crosthwaite, winner of the fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, spoke with Taína Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latinx Art and History at the National Portrait Gallery, and co-curator of The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. Allowing the act of drawing to organically dictate his compositions in works that range from intimate drawings to large scale murals, Crosthwaite juxtaposes a wide range of textural and tonal ranges against spaces that alternate from dense and atmospheric to flat and graphic. His subjects—the everyday people that populate the border region of San Diego/Tijuana—are presented in a nonidealized documentary style that allows them to appear in their humble familiarity and authenticity.  

Caragol introduces the exhibition, and Crosthwaite discusses his winning artwork, the stop-motion drawing animation A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez (2018). The animation is also screened during the conversation.