The Brooklyn Rail

In 2018, Amy Sherald achieved national attention for painting the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Titled Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, it is a remarkable work, not only for what it reveals about its subject, but also for what it refrains from revealing. Like many of the other forty-seven works in Sarah Roberts’s curation of this mid-career survey, it says something about the oftentimes vexing problem of portraying a specific person while also representing a generalized type of person, a perennial problem for every artist engaged with portraiture. This has to do with the double meaning of the word “identity,” which in different usages can refer to subject-positions designated by social hierarchies, or one that stands in embodied disregard for such designations. Each individual painting features a psychological tension between disassociation and a call for empathy, consistently playing conflicting notions of identity with and against each other.

In the Michelle Obama portrait, we see the former First Lady’s head resting atop her enlarged right hand while her elongated left arm snakes over and across her lap. In keeping with a ridiculous controversy from over a decade ago, she is portrayed with bare shoulders. Her body is cloaked in a billowing dress fashioned from patchwork fabric modeled after a quilt made by one of the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, all backdropped by a soft, sky-blue background. Pursed lips and an intent stare bespeak suspicion directed at the viewer, suggesting that Mrs. Obama is holding something back, be it something angry or something shameful. As is the case with all of Sherald’s figures, skin tones are articulated in grayscale grisaille, bespeaking study of old master techniques with Odd Nerdrum in the summer of 2008.

A sharp tension between grayscale skin tones and flamboyantly colored costumes is constant throughout the exhibition, further exaggerated by how flatly the extravagant costumes are painted in contrast to the modeled dimensionality of the figures. This tension conjures the “double consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in 1903, stemming from the ways that African American people are seen through the unsympathetic eyes of a dominant white culture that contrasts the ways that they see themselves.

The paintings in this exhibition are all large and executed in oil, the majority being frontal, single figure portraits centrally positioned amid flat, brightly colored picture spaces. They seem to have some kinship with Alex Katz’s portraits of family and friends using flattened forms and simple details while also reaching back to the work of Edward Hopper, and in some cases René Magritte. Many show figures holding improbable attributes, such as the giant teacup clutched by the red hatted woman depicted in Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013) or the disembodied horse head dangling from the neck of the blue jacketed Pony Boy from 2008. In these and other works, it is impossible to tell if the figures represented therein are professional models or people with whom Sherald is familiar. The 2020 painting of Breonna Taylor epitomizes this disjunction, showing Taylor standing proud and confident while cloaked in a blue dress posed against an aqua background. This work was painted shortly after Taylor’s murder, later reproduced on the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair.

Other paintings in the exhibition could be called “situation works,” in that they feature figures positioned as if they were actors frozen in a stage play. In A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt) from 2022, we see an African American man clad in bib overalls proudly perched atop a flatly painted John Deere tractor. Other situation works salute iconic photographs from long ago, such as For Love, and for Country (2022), depicting two African American figures posed in the manner of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photo of the famous V-J Day kiss in Times Square. Another locates another African American man sitting high atop an iron girder, riffing on the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph from 1932, often misattributed to Lewis Hine. These works reflect on Sherald’s own working process of conducting photoshoots in advance of starting a painting. An Art21 video about Sherald clues us in to how she spent time wondering about her own family history as represented in a collection of antique black-and-white photographs. Indeed, the fraught tension between remembering and misremembering seems to be the animating obsession undergirding Sherald’s work, as it simultaneously expands on what it means to be an American while also providing a pointed counter-narrative about the ways that identity has been selectively codified in the image regimes of the past two centuries.