In the contemplative looks of the characters of Amy Sherald, we could see each other, our friends and our family or any pastor. The artist born in Georgia places his meticulous figurative paintings in the tradition of American realism. His accent on the universal, the “ordinary”, is characteristic of the movement, which has historically been defined by writers like Mark Twain and Henry James, and painters like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. American sublimeSherald's Mid-Career Survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, presents his paintings as a refreshing expansion of his cannon and encourages us to consider the long-term contempt of black representation painters such as Charles White, Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald Motley Jr., or Barkley L. Hendricks, from conversations main figures.
The subjects of Sherald – Blacks dressed in fashion rendered in shades of gray – tell a story. She scouts, styles, poses and photography, designing a story for everyone. Going the galleries of the show, I thought of writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, and their poetic refusal but flawless to divert the daily horrors of American life. Among the ultimate columnists of the black American experience, their writings offer a biting and bloody context for American realism from the African-American point of view. Sherald cited these women as among its conceptual lights to develop its artistic philosophy – on the walls of American sublime are paintings whose titles sign in Morrison Beloved And Salomon song, Hurston Their eyes looked God, And the poetry of Lucille Clifton. Sherald Tricasse of historical, cinematographic and literary references in several of her works, integrating their inheritance into the distinct visual world that she created.
Experience the portraits of Sherald closely and in person ended me, stirring a multitude of unexpected emotions. Installed at the average level of the eyes, I stood face to face with these life -size figures and their guaranteed deliberative looks, suggesting complex interiors despite their enigmatic facial expressions. The more you worry, the more their shades seem to take place.
The chronological arrangement leads you through the older work of Sherald to its latest pieces, which are larger, larger, more succulent and more detailed. His technical competence is obvious and improved in progress throughout his career, including almost two decades American sublime covers. A shirt embroidered in the portrait “a bucket full of treasures (dad gave me sun to put in my pockets …)” (2020) looks so naturalistic, I had to look to guarantee that she had not put on the linen canvas.
However, his first painting, “Hangman” (2007), immediately struck me. The members of a man mix with the distinctive spots of Sherald, created by drops of turpentine, while he rises through the canvas, three lively silhouettes barely visible in the background. Its metal tones recall 12th century crucifixion paintingsAnd its title indicates its historical reference point – the atrocities of Jim Crow Lynch Mobs. It seems peaceful, his eyes closed and the neck extended to the heavens. This is one of the only works on display where the eyes of the subject do not meet ours. It is a powerful refusal, a moment of autonomy recovered in the face of a miserable story. In the centerpiece of the exhibition, “Michelle Lavaughn Robinson Obama” (2018), the infamous painting of the artist of the only Black Lady of the Nation, we are invited to contemplate the monumental black journey to the United States.
The portrait commission was the determining moment of Sherald's career. In the exhibition, it is the only canvas willed with protective glass, while the others are displayed without a frame. The painting is partitioned in its own gallery, separating it from the others in sight, which are presented together, as if the figures were in conversation, or in community, with each other. The separation of the portrait of Obama from the rest of the conservation, which warmly celebrates the livelihoods of “ordinary” blacks, felt pronounced. The removal of the portrait of the First Lady of this conversation seems to exalt too much, but transmits volumes on our political moment and its stratifications. The resemblance was significant a lotBut its display in Whitney only underlined my concerns concerning the privilege of political figures as a symbols of progress solely on the basis of diversity and the hollow nucleus of the policy of representation.
The portrait of Sherald de Breonna Taylor, a 26 -year -old medical worker murdered by police on March 13, 2020, underlines this point. Making two years after the completion of the portrait of Michelle Obama, the tragic death of Taylor highlighted the persistent brutality of the anti-black and sparked protests and conversations around the race in the world. By approaching painting, I was amazed. I had already seen the image, on the cover of VanityAfter being commissioned by the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to decorate the September 2020 issue of the magazine. Presented in the gallery, however, Taylor's resemblance is imbued with a powerful emotional weight that made me cry. Consulting the family of Taylor, Sherald adorned the young woman in a shiny turquoise dress on a acute background; A delicate cross hangs around his neck, and at his finger, a engagement ring alluded to the proposal that his boyfriend had planned before his death. Taylor's face is presented on his own wall, but in a light section of the galleries, with other portraits on all sides, a recall of the connected connections with his peers and his family.
In the years following the painting of the portrait of Michelle Obama, the works of Sherald increased in size and detail. The artist moved to his approach to narration, his more pronounced, more monumental parables. “For Love, and for Country” (2022) reinvents the famous “VJ Day in Times Square” (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt as a kiss between men, while “Trans forming freedom” (2024) envisages the statue of freedom as a “non -binary transfer person”, as the text of the wall says. These queer portraits, facing the exhibition, are among the most important. Rather than looking at them directly, we are asked to look up, to venerate, to celebrate. In “Kingdom” (2022), a young boy stands at the top of an aluminum slide, his metal surface made beautifully. Surrounded by an open sky, it seems triumphant. The work spoke of a portrait of anterior Sherald representing a teenager in a superhero t-shirt, “innocent you, innocent me” (2016), a criticism of “adulthification” of black children and the deadly consequences of this insidious facet of structural racism.
In a short documentary projection in American sublimeSherald recounts his first meeting with a portrait of a black man in a museum, during a sixth year excursion, as a decisive moment in his identity training. Many black artists and criticisms, including me, could tell you a similar story. For some children, Sherald's canvases can serve this same objective, by presenting them to their first black face in the museum space. This is something they can transport, because me, and perhaps Sherald, organized the works of Morrison, Hurston, etc. To guide us.
Amay Amy: American sublime Continue to the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan) until August 10. The exhibition was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and organized by Sarah Roberts, formerly of SFMOMA, and the Rujo Hockley of Whitney, with David Lisbon.
