PAFA presents "Narcissus in the Studio."

When artist Mia Rosenthal was asked to do a self-portrait, her son Kirby was 5 months old, and a look in her closet revealed pretty much everything about her life at that moment.

Given the demands on her time, Rosenthal might have been forgiven for simply throwing a status update on Facebook about it - something along the lines of "I cannot believe my closet is filled with big ugly bras and baggy sweatpants" - and leaving it at that.

After all, that's what the rest of the world does, and is doing, at nearly every moment of the day.

Instead, being an artist more inclined toward a lasting and material statement, she turned it into Postpartum Portrait, an ink-and-graphite-on-paper catalog of the contents of her post-pregnancy closet, one of more than 100 works in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' intriguing new exhibit "Narcissus in the Studio: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits."

"It doesn't have a figure in it, but I still consider it a portrait," Rosenthal, 32, said. "Looking at my closet was such a troubling thing - because your identity is really tied in to your clothes, how you present yourself to the world. All you have are T-shirts and sweatpants and big, plain underwear - maybe you don't feel so fantastic about yourself.

"In my life, I wouldn't ever say to someone, 'Oh my God, this underwear.' "

But in a culture where so many would ("U know it is time to have ur baby when u cannot fit into ur maternity clothes. #iamready," read one recent tweet), can a museum exhibition of self-portraiture reveal something more profound about self-expression and identity, against the din of the more pedestrian narcissistic culture created by modern technology?

"You want to come up with this avatar that represents you," said Philadelphia artist Rob Matthews, whose The Assumption at Ridglea combines Christian symbolism (mousetrap) and form (the polyptych) with drawings of himself, his wife, and a suburban tract neighborhood (above which a tiny shrouded figure is rising to heaven).

"Whether they're artists or not, people tend to get conceptual with their profile pictures," he said. "It's pretty established, the idea of an icon representing a person. It's this current generation's way of thinking about it. I don't think people ever get tired of looking at the way other people interpret themselves."