The achingly human art of Michelle Obama's portraitist

Boston Globe

23-04-2025

Maybe the Whitney had that in mind, too: In just three months, the new administration has sledgehammered its way through American institutions
knows
.
Amy Sherald's "A Bucket Full of Treasures (Papa Gave Me Sunshine to Put in My Pocket)," 2020, left, and "As Soft as She Is...," 2022.
Joseph Hyde
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It's something, you must admit, to portray someone so public, and so beloved by so many, as anything other than simply beautiful. Sherald does her much greater honor: She is beautiful — just not simply. This is the magic that she achieves in almost every picture, with a grace and softness that belies her complexity of intent. Each of Sherald's paintings is achingly human, and then so much more.
Sherald, who was born in Columbus, Ga., in 1973, is a portraitist — devotedly, exclusively. But like any great portraitist — and that, she is — her portrayals of people transcend the skin deep. They are intimate and deeply personal, while expansive in their context, both culturally and historically.
Her figures float largely on monochromatic backgrounds, free of setting or era, an unsettling fusion of the intimate and the unknown — allegories and archetypes with impossibly human eyes. There are too many to adequately describe piece by piece — 'As Soft as She Is …,' 2022, of a woman in a leopard print coat against a field of dusty pink, held my gaze a long time with its inscrutable humanity — though each offers a distinct experience, like a connection to a particular soul. But they exhibit a haunting unity as the work of a painter with extravagant gifts, able to capture essence as well as image, the immediate and the ineffable, all at once.
Installation view of "Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art. From left: "What's precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American)," 2017; "She Always Believed the Good about Those She Loved," 2018; "Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between," 2018; "As American as Apple Pie," 2020; "Innocent You, Innocent Me," 2016; "What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth," 2017; "All Things Bright and Beautiful," 2016.
Tiffany Sage/BFA.com
'American Sublime' spans not quite 20 years of Sherald's painting life. Its earliest works are from 2007, through to some painted just last year. Across that span is a disarming consistency: Sherald achieved broad acclaim
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Sherald paints people right-size; when you stand in front of one of her works, the figure within feels as though he or she could step out and stand next to you. A key element has been there from the start: She paints her subjects' skin in
The subtle discordance introduces a paradox — does it make race less apparent, or more? To be clear: Sherald's work is about Black life, but more broadly, about Black visibility, an ethic she shares with senior painters like Henry Taylor or Kerry James Marshall. Marshall paints all his figures' skin almost exclusively in deep ebony, a forceful act of self-declaration; he has often said his work is about rebuilding an art historical canon retrofit with Black stories forever excluded, freighting his figures with allegorical intent. But Sherald elides the declarative for the suggestive and nuanced. What you see before you is always a human being first, frank and open about being seen.
Amy Sherald, "A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt)," 2022. © Amy Sherald.
Joseph Hyde
When she departs, however infrequently, from straight portraiture, like Marshall, she casts her subjects in everyday scenes that sometimes push against expectation: 'A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt),' 2022, of a proud Black farmer astride a massive John Deere tractor, asserts Black presence in a rural American life.
Her earliest works here don't have the same clarity as some made just a few years later — 'Hangman,' from 2007, depicts a Black man in profile, awash in a ruddy ochre fog banded in lavender — but the softly forthright strategy that is her hallmark emerged quickly. 'They Call Me Redbone, but I'd rather be Strawberry Shortcake,' from 2009, floats a young girl in a bright yellow floral dress with a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks on a background of hazy pink; her head tilts just so — inquisitive, or condemning? The title brings into the frame an element of biography: 'Redbone,' a block of text on the wall explains, is a term for a pale-skinned Black person, like Sherald herself — and her desire to simply be a child, Black or not.
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Amy Sherald's "Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own," 2016, left, and "They Call Me Redbone, but I'd Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake," 2009.
Joseph Hyde/Ryan Stevenson
Titles matter to Sherald, infusing her plainspoken work with contextual freight. 'Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own,' a mesmerizing 2016 picture of an uneasy-looking woman in a floppy sun hat and fancy spaghetti-strapped dress clutching her handbag close, takes it's name from a Lucille Clifton poem; it reads almost as a mantra of reassurance running through the subject's head, as she navigates an unwelcoming world. Other works bring authors like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jane Austen into their titles; what they all share, like Sherald, is a mind-set of liberation from whatever forces keep them in their place.
When Sherald dips into charged moments of racial animus, it's deftly and with humanity held close. 'Innocent You, Innocent Me,' 2016, of a teen boy in a hoodie, pays homage to
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Amy Sherald, "Breonna Taylor," 2020. The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. © Amy Sherald.
Joseph Hyde
This, of course, is the point: The painting was made for the cover of
If there was ever a show for this very moment, this is it. The withering of normalcy in American life since January has been swift, brutal, and profound. 'American Sublime' is affirming, countering its tsunami of despair with a noble grace, powerfully, quietly present in every work. I wanted to live inside it. I wish I could.
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AMY SHERALD: AMERICAN SUBLIME
Through Aug. 10. Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., New York, N.Y. 212-570-3600,
Murray Whyte can be reached at