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New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Amy Sherald's Blue Sky Vision for America
It has been Amy Sherald's fate to be known for one painting only. Her portrait of Michelle Obama, commissioned in 2018 by the National Portrait Gallery, brought the artist overnight fame. Ignoring the conventions of academic portraiture, a genre associated with pale men standing in front of burgundy drapes, Sherald liberated America's first lady from the fusty, cigar-brown rooms of the past. Obama, dressed in a sleeveless gown, leans forward in her chair, channeling Rodin's 'Thinker.' The background, a featureless expanse of powder blue, suggests fresh air. The painting is an anomaly in Sherald's oeuvre. 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' a compact and rousing retrospective of 42 paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, brings us the work of an artist who is not primarily a recorder of first ladies or famous faces. Rather, Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize. She can be preachy, but her paintings are saved from sentimentality by an unerring sense of geometric design and a taste for spare, simplified, super-flat planes. Stepping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the museum, you find yourself contemplating a curved, rather amazing wall hung with five life-size portraits, each in a different sizzling color. 'The Girl Next Door' (2019), my favorite, shows a young woman in a white polka-dot dress, silhouetted against an emerald green background. Compared with the effortlessly attractive girl-next-door we know from countless films, Sherald has painted a touchingly awkward woman, her red leather belt rising up from her waist to her chest. But you can see that she is trying to look her best. Her immaculate dress, her red lipstick, her fixed-up hair with its attractive side part, are careful efforts at self-presentation that speak volumes about American girlhood. Sherald, who is 51, composes her scenes with extreme deliberation. She picks out models for her paintings and outfits them with costumes and props. She photographs them and works from her reference photographs to situate Black faces and figures into roles and settings complete with suburban lawns, white picket fences and other nostalgic symbols of American plenty. Here is a world in which it is usually summer, and days are squinty bright and shadowless. 'I'm an escapist,' Sherald once said in an interview. 'I love the Teletubbies — the idea of grass with no bugs makes me happy.' Her titles add another layer of fictional intrigue. Sometimes taken from novels or poems, they alternately heroicize her figures or gently poke fun at the human capacity for small, foolish, everyday self-deceptions. For instance, 'It Made Sense … Mostly in her Mind' (2011), shows a 30-ish woman dressed in a timeless navy blazer with gold buttons. She could be a lawyer until you notice she's wearing a lavender plastic helmet and holding an old-fashioned toy, a pink-and-white unicorn stick horse. It doesn't add up, but you can't say Sherald didn't warn us: The outfit did make sense … mostly in the subject's wishful and daydreamy mind. In some ways, Sherald's paintings are re-enactments of the childhood game of dress up. She is drawn to loud, retro-ish fabrics — to wide stripes and dresses imprinted with floral patterns or strewed with rows of strawberries or cherries or lemons. She excels at painting pleated skirts, their folds of fabric as stately and evenly spaced as ancient Greek columns. And note the exaggeratedly clean ambience. White shirts gleam with Tide-strength brightness, and khakis remain unblemished by mystery grease stains. You cannot find fresher clothing in the work of any contemporary painter, with the exception of Alex Katz, the pre-eminent realist, now in his 90s, who similarly garbs his figures in shirts and pants that look as if they were removed five minutes earlier from a J. Crew gift box. In the case of both artists, the squeaky-clean attire echoes in the formal neatness of their respective painting styles. In Sherald's case, at times I found myself searching in vain for any sign of an emphatic brush stroke, a trace of touch. This is especially true in a series of larger-than-life genre scenes that represent her more recent work. 'A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt),' from 2022, a mural-size painting stretching 11 feet wide, shows a man sitting atop a brand-new green tractor. What's problematic is that Sherald's instinct for pristine surfaces — which adds so much allure to her images of clothing — makes the tractor look as blandly commercial as an item in a mail-order catalog. The man could be sitting in a printed ad for a John Deere 820. Sherald's vertical portraits, by contrast, retain their pictorial charisma despite a certain repetitiveness. Nearly all of the portraits in the show, which go back to 2008, are exactly the same size (54 inches by 43 inches). The figures in her paintings, whether men, women or children, tend to have the same unblinking, inscrutable expression. They gaze at you alertly but noncommittedly, as if listening in silent judgment as you tell them a story that doesn't quite make sense. Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1973, Sherald majored in fine art at Clark Atlanta, a historically Black university. She moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, earning her M.F.A. in 2004. She has spoken openly about her health issues. She was just finishing graduate school when she was diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a serious heart condition. One day in 2012 she passed out in a Rite Aid pharmacy and woke up in a pool of blood. She was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she waited two months for a donor's heart and then underwent surgery for a heart transplant. Four years passed. In 2016, she rose to wide attention when she became the first woman and the first Black person to be awarded the grand prize in the National Portrait Gallery's prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which is open to any artist in the United States. Her entry, 'Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)' (2014), is a coolly charming portrait of a Black woman in a bold polka-dot dress. She holds, in her white-gloved hands, an impossibly large teacup and saucer, exemplifying Sherald's tendency to mingle realism and fantasy. 'Kingdom' (2022), for instance — one of the standouts of the show — is a low-angled, 10-foot-tall view of a schoolboy perched on the top rung of a playground slide, his spiky, stand-up hair silhouetted against a blue sky. In a sherpa-lined denim jacket, tan pants and unscuffed white sneakers, he could be any boy of 8 or 9, anyone's brother or son. Except that he occupies the pinnacle of the painting's Renaissance-style triangular composition, looming above us, a momentary king of the universe. Sublime or Not Sublime? So how should we categorize Sherald's style? 'American Sublime,' which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has a baffling title. The word 'sublime,' an art-historical term, refers to art that inspires rapture or terror in a viewer, usually in response to the enormousness and grandeur of nature. When you open the Sherald exhibition catalog to Page 10 and see a full-page reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich's 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog' (1817), an icon of German romanticism that appeared in a show that just closed at the Met, you wonder if you picked up the wrong catalog. Sherald's work is not sublime, but in its emphasis on the transforming power of clothing, it can fairly be called 'superfine,' to borrow a word from the title of another Met show.` Sherald, it seems clear, is an American realist, recording ordinary people and pleasures. Her work is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's illustrations for the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. He, too, combined and recombined reference photographs of his models to construct narratives of optimism and uplift about everyday Americans. One of Rockwell's acolytes, the painter Bo Bartlett, is a well-known realist, now 69, also from Columbus, Ga. Once, as a schoolgirl, Sherald saw a large-scale painting at the Columbus Museum that showed a Black man standing proudly outside a small brick house; it was painted by Bartlett, who is white. Sherald, who said she had never seen a painting of a Black person before, has described the moment as life changing, awakening her to how she wanted to spend her future. Even now, her genre scenes, especially 'A Midsummer Afternoon Dream' (2021), nod to Bartlett's luminous, blue-skied landscapes. Sherald also owes something to Horace Pippin, the pioneering, early-20th-century Black artist. In his 'Self-Portrait' (1941) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, he rendered his face as a mask of gray monotone. Sherald similarly depicts the skin tones of her figures in neutral gray rather than in natural browns. She has said that she uses grayscale to sidestep the issue of racial categorization. Yet she does take on politics, especially in her 'Breonna Taylor' (2020), an ethereal turquoise-on-turquoise portrait of the 26-year-old medical worker who was killed in her own apartment in Louisville, Ky., in a botched police raid. 'American Sublime' will no doubt acquire a sharper political edge on Sept. 19, when it opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Portrait Gallery is part of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution and consequently vulnerable to recent orders from the executive branch seeking to dismantle or reshape programs that give off a whiff of diversity, equity or inclusion. The irony is that Sherald's work is not about categorizing one group or class of people. Rather it's about characterizing folks with visibly different lives, ranging from a schoolgirl in pig tails to a legless boxer resting against ropes of red, white and blue, to a tall, transgender woman in a hot-pink wig and high-slit dress posing as the Statue of Liberty. It is cliché these days to say that we want to 'feel seen' or validated, but here's the question: If we are all hoping to feel seen, who will be left to do the looking? Sherald, for one.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
50 Years After the Fall of Saigon, Three Vietnamese American Artists Reflect on Loss and Resilience
Exactly fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War—a nearly two-decade-long conflict—came to a definitive end with the fall of Saigon. As North Vietnamese forces took control of the South's capital, the country was officially reunified under communist rule. In the aftermath, more than two million Vietnamese fled their homeland in search of safety and freedom, with nearly 760,000 resettling in the United States between 1975 and 2002. The U.S. involvement in the war, which began with aid to South Vietnam but escalated into a full-scale military intervention, was met with intense criticism both domestically and abroad. Widely viewed as a harrowing example of American imperialism and military overreach, the conflict remains one of the most controversial and painful chapters in U.S. history. Today, the echoes of that war still resonate across generations. In Vietnam, its scars are etched into the landscape and collective memory. In America, Vietnamese communities continue to grapple with questions of identity, exile, and belonging. For many, these questions are not just historical—they are deeply personal. Art, in its power to carry and transform emotion, has offered a way through. For numerous Vietnamese American artists, creative expression has become a vehicle to confront, reframe, and make sense of inherited trauma and personal displacement. Below, three leading Vietnamese American creatives—photographer An-My Lê, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyen—share how their art has been shaped by the legacy of war. Through their distinct practices, they explore memory, loss, resistance, and what it means to create from the margins of a story that once defined them. An-My Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and fled Vietnam for the United States in 1975, eventually resettling in Sacramento, California. Known for her evocative large-format images that explore the legacies of war and the complexities of military power, her work often blends documentary and staged elements to question the boundaries between history and memory. Lê's critically acclaimed series, such as Small Wars and 29 Palms, have been exhibited internationally and her work has been collected by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. About a year and a half ago, in November 2023, a bunch of us Vietnamese American and American Vietnamese artists in New York decided to get together—and we've been getting together every two months or so since. We get together around food or around someone's book launch or for a holiday or something like that. When it was my turn [to host], in early February of this year, I prepared something for Tết [which celebrates the arrival of spring] at my house. It was very festive. At one point when we all sat down, one of the younger artists asked, 'What are your favorite memories of Tết?' I said Tết 1968, which of course was the day of the surprise attack on Saigon during the Vietnam War; it was very traumatic. Another artist close in age to me who grew up in Da Nang, said, 'I remember that that night. The ammunition storage that was in Da Nang got hit and it blew up like fireworks.' So he was talking about something that was devastating but also beautiful to watch. Then the younger artists followed up with happy memories; I think that speaks to the fact that the way we approach things depends on our experience. At the beginning of my photography practice, I didn't even want to think about the idea of war because it was so traumatic. But while I was in grad school for photography at Yale, President Clinton lifted the economic embargo on and renewed relations with Vietnam, which meant that Vietnamese Americans were able to return home safely. When I graduated, I got a small grant, and I went to Vietnam and became a landscape photographer there. In my head I was going to do something else. The pictures I made were about contemporary Vietnam, but they were also about the things that I felt I had missed growing up in a country during a war, about the things I could barely remember that I experienced a little bit in my childhood. They're about stories I heard and family lore. My mother is from the North where the landscape is radically different from the South, and I never knew that because the country was separated in 1954. Those first pictures I took of Vietnam helped make things I'd heard about or remembered but didn't have access to tangible. I was very engaged with anything that had to do with daily life, manual labor and agricultural traditions. Those are things that tie us to the land and echo more peaceful times. After photographing there for a few years, it was obvious that I needed to address the issue of war. I was not interested in recreating what we already know about the Vietnam War in my images. I was more interested in Americans' idea of the war, how they had been thinking about it. I also wanted to explore my relationship to the war. Some of [what I know] is real and some of it is filtered through films and literature. When I started working with the American military, I think some people misunderstood. 'But they destroyed your country. Why do you want to have to do anything with them?' It's much more complicated than that. I wanted to understand an institution that I have very mixed emotions about, so I think it allowed me to parse out my ambiguous feelings. I can be empathetic towards members of the armed forces, especially the women, while being appalled by some of the geopolitical decisions that were made. With my photographic and video series 29 Palms, which I captured at the 29 Palms Marines training facility in California, I was distraught about the effect of another war on a young group of American men and women who were training for deployment to Iraq. The series doesn't just question how they'll be affected by war and what will happen to them, which is devastating, but it also examines the effect of war on their communities. It's as much about the Marines as it is about the way it affects the extended families and the rest of the country. Photography has the ability to engage with a complex subject in complex ways, and you don't necessarily have to simplify the equation. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in South Vietnam in 1971. His family fled Vietnam for the United States in 1975, eventually settling in California. He is the author of the novel The Sympathizer, which became a MAX Original Series, as well as the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, among other books. I grew up in the United States as an American, but also very aware of myself as a Vietnamese person who had come from a war. My refugee experience has been fundamental to who I am as a writer and as a human being. What's been really crucial to shaping my artistic practice has been to recognize that wars always produce refugees and wars are central to the United States. Arguably, perpetual war characterizes American history. My work has been very much about using war and refugees to pry apart so much of American mythology. I write about the Vietnam War and its consequences from the perspectives of diverse Vietnamese peoples and not from American points of view. And that's been a challenge because if Americans encounter narratives that do not put Americans at the center, they have a hard time comprehending what is happening. at I'm sick and tired of this anniversary. We have learned all the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War. We will pretend that we learned to 'always remember the past' and 'remember the casualties.' But the lesson we should have learned is that we should never interfere with another country's struggles for independence and liberation, as Americans. And of course in the years after the Vietnam War, what we saw is that we did precisely that from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel and Palestine. This effort to rewrite a bad war as a good war has taken place at the highest levels of government, and it's been bipartisan. It doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican leader of this country. American presidents have always said it was a noble but flawed war, and that the lesson we should learn for our next war is how to fight that war better. That has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I've visited a lot of historical museums in Vietnam. I've read the comments in the guest books. Half of the American tourist population says, 'oh my God, we were guilty of war crimes.' The other half says,' hey, this is communist propaganda.' It's not to say that the memory of the victorious Vietnamese and Vietnam is not important. In Vietnam, it's important for the victorious Vietnamese to assert their history, but in so doing, they also arguably distort the history. Because if you were a defeated Vietnamese, and you go and you look at the historical accounts, what you also see is erasure and distortion from your perspective. And that's to serve the current power structure of the Vietnamese government. That is not unusual. It happens in every country, but what happens in Vietnam, mostly stays in Vietnam. What happens in the United States ripples all over the world. I will be spending the 50th anniversary writing about all the consequences of the Vietnam War, in places like El Salvador. I was in El Salvador in February, investigating massacres that were committed by US trained soldiers at the same time that Marco Rubio was in town signing the deportation agreement with President Bukele, now very much front page news. That is a direct consequence of the Vietnam War because in 1983, Ronald Reagan said 'the lines of the Cold War have shifted to El Salvador.' And we're dealing with the long term consequences of that. The Vietnam War has embedded itself in American culture and is shaping our contemporary politics today. Born in Saigon and raised in California after his family fled Vietnam in 1979, Tuan Andrew Nguyen is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores themes of memory, trauma, and the legacies of colonialism and war. Nguyen often uses storytelling and speculative history to give voice to marginalized narratives, and his films and sculptural installations have been exhibited globally, including at the Venice Biennale. On October 31, Nugyen will unveil a new 20-foot-high kinetic mobile at the brand new Princeton University Art Museum. I grew up fascinated with storytelling, which is the way I came to understand my place in the world. After we left Vietnam we landed in Oklahoma, where there weren't very many Vietnamese people. I would take the stories I heard from my grandparents or from aunties and uncles and friends and try to piece together an answer for myself. I moved back to Vietnam in my late 20s to be with my maternal grandmother, who stayed in Vietnam but managed to get most of her children out. She was a writer and a poet, and I grew up hearing about how she used writing as a way to reflect upon her situation. On a more philosophical level, I wanted to broaden my understanding of Vietnam. I've spent half of my life between Vietnam and the US. My fascination with storytelling is what initially brought me to practicing art. My work has always been very grounded in trying to figure out what the war and its legacy means. I work a lot in moving image and sculpture, with this idea of storytelling as a form of empowerment or political resistance or solidarity. I think about the moving image as a place to explore the different entanglements of my own personal history and the overall history of the world. My sculptures are an extension of how I tell stories. They're very much based in looking at materials that have a certain historical weight and trying to find ways to transform them. My work spans different regions and different histories, but all of it is rooted by my preoccupation with the outcomes and the traumas left behind by colonialism, war and displacement. I've worked with indigenous people in Australia who were forced off their native land. I've collaborated with the Senegalese Vietnamese community in Dakar who come out of a migration of Vietnamese women and children after the French were defeated in Vietnam in 1954. I've also been working with communities in the central region of Vietnam, particularly in Quảng Trị, that is still–50 years after the end of the war–dealing with the catastrophic effects of UXO, or unexploded ordnance. The number of civilians in Vietnam who have died from or been seriously injured or maimed because of UXO explosions during peacetime far exceeds the active American military casualties during wartime. These are numbers that we are constantly faced with as we look at the legacy of the American war in Vietnam. They're physical reminders of what happened. So, even though my practice spans a broad geography, it all comes from a very personal journey of trying to figure out what it means to be resilient in the face of destruction. And I've met amazing people with amazing stories on this journey. Has anything become crystallized through my work? No, I find myself with more and more questions. But I think that's the journey that this career has to give. I think art must provide more questions and not necessarily provide answers. It's important to understand the world in a very dimensional way, because, if not, we're going to be easily Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Caught Between Two Worlds, an Artist Prepares for His Biggest Show Yet
Salman Toor needed a better perspective. Backing slowly away from his easel, the 42-year-old artist closed one eye and raised a thumb. He arched his back to gain a few more centimeters of distance and then snapped upright. Exasperation led to acceptance. He buried any doubts and raised a paintbrush, once again, to the emerald-green portrait of his mystery man in heart-shaped sunglasses. On a morning in March, the walls were covered with dozens of new drawings, paintings and etchings that Toor has created over the last few years in anticipation of his largest exhibition to date, 'Wish Maker,' which opens May 2 across Luhring Augustine's two galleries in Manhattan. The show aims to reintroduce the artist — who was born in Lahore, Pakistan — as one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, capable of remixing old European techniques into contemporary scenes of queer desire and the immigrant experience. This was Toor's first chance at seeing everything in one room to decide which pictures he is comfortable exhibiting at a time when his work has become more politically conflicted and emotionally raw. 'There is a lingering question,' the artist said. 'What am I doing here in America?' Receiving his United States citizenship in 2019 and committing to life in New York felt like he was leaving his family behind to some degree. His parents remained supportive but distant; they have never seen one of his major shows in person because, he suggested, of the frank depictions of queer sexuality that run counter to their conservative community in Pakistan. 'It is too long of a conceptual distance to be comprehended,' Toor explained of his parents. Those boundaries have remained fixed, even as Toor's celebrity has grown in international circles on the heels of last year's Venice Biennale, titled 'Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere.' In an exhibition, he presented a septet of paintings that he said was 'about feelings of empowerment, the humiliation of sometimes moving from one culture to another, and, I guess, the cost of that freedom for someone like me.' Adriano Pedrosa, the biennale's curator, said that Toor had a singular style. 'I think it is very duplicitous work,' he said. 'It's not very straightforward. It is sexy; sometimes it is even violent. But on the other hand it is gorgeous painting.' But along with his global fan base has come a new level of pressure on himself to exceed expectations. 'My life used to be very small,' said Toor, whose soft features and calming voice make stepping into his studio feel like entering the nicest therapist's office in Brooklyn. 'I didn't have my own room until I was 21 years old.' Echoes of Home Toor's initial breakthrough came in 2020 when a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art introduced audiences to his unique style, self-effacing humor and autobiographical scenes. The show was a hit, its 15 works bathed in emerald tones that have become the artist's signature. Writing in The New York Times, the art critic Roberta Smith said, 'The mood in these paintings is introspective yet ever-so-slightly comedic even when things turn sinister.' Two years later, his painting called 'Four Friends' sold for nearly $1.6 million at auction. Then, he became nervous about overexposure and becoming another young artist whose career gets caught in the boom-and-bust economics of art speculation. Toor largely retreated from the commercial side of the art world, focusing on painting in his studio and a makeshift space in Lahore when visiting family in the sun-drenched city. His color palette became more varied, including more ocean blues, acid yellows and scabby reds. His line work got looser as he became increasingly frustrated by his own conventions. 'My hand was tracing the same sort of face and the same sort of body,' Toor said. 'At some point, I had to undo the exercise of copying myself. Every now and then I have to take a step back and ask what I am doing?' Back home last summer, Toor remembered why he left Pakistan. The country still criminalizes homosexuality with potential fines and sentences ranging from two years to life imprisonment for sexual acts, though the law is not strictly enforced. And despite being a famous artist, and in a long-term relationship with the Pakistani singer Ali Sethi, he feels discouraged from expressing his identity there. 'Going home is deeply rejuvenating,' said Toor, who painted four canvases during his last summer visit, including scenes of a Grindr hookup and a memento-mori skull. When he graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009, Toor was painting as if he was an apprentice of the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. He had started making classical portraits of friends that included a strange scribble of paint above their heads. That is when Catherine Redmond, his painting professor at Pratt, knew something was about to change. His brushstrokes were becoming less about the Renaissance and more about him. 'Then the green paintings came,' she said. 'Green is a very difficult color to use because it automatically has red in it — its opposite on the color wheel — and it's such a raw color. It is hard to control. So when you're looking at one of his green paintings, you don't even know that your brain is actually seeing red.' A darkness that once simmered below the surface of his paintings was now starting to seep through the canvas. You can see it in one of his most haunting pictures, which currently sits in the brightest corner of his studio: Titled 'Night Cemetery,' it depicts an Islamic graveyard floating in the blackness of space. It has taken two painful years to complete the work, which Toor said gained new relevance in response to the war in Gaza. 'I wanted to retreat to this peaceful, ghostly space,' Toor said. 'Where there was this presence of ancestors. I wanted to escape to this place of twilight and think about the idea of death.' Bigger paintings than this one have vexed Toor, who prefers to work on a more intimate scale. He missed a deadline to include a large work in the 2024 Venice Biennale and must hold back another uncompleted behemoth — a New York street scene of brownstones and hunky construction workers — from his upcoming exhibition. 'It has been hellish,' Toor said, explaining that large paintings exact a physical toll that requires painting from his elbow while balancing on ladders. Smaller images allow him to concentrate on singular themes like belonging, memory, failure, sex and comedy. But the artist requires greater complexity in his larger paintings to plumb the entire depth of human experience — a standard of perfectionism that drives his ambition. A Newfound Confidence Six years ago, Toor was still transporting his paintings around New York in trash bags, waiting for the art world to take notice. Now his paintings sell in galleries between $50,000 and $300,000 or more, depending on the size. According to his gallerist, Donald Johnson-Montenegro of Luhring Augustine, the drawings will sell for anywhere between $20,000 and $90,000. But the artist still remembers his struggling start, as he built a community of queer artists in New York, including Doron Langberg and Somnath Bhatt. Glimmers of those friends appear in his paintings; for example, the mystery man wearing heart-shaped sunglasses has the same curly hair and wide eyes as Langberg, who traded paintings with Toor in 2019 and bonded over their approaches to figurative painting. 'It's funny when I visit Salman's studio,' said Langberg, 'because he will show me a painting that I think is completely stunning, and he would say that he was going to repaint half of it. Then I would come back a few months later and he had completely reworked it.' Langberg continued: 'He has a very specific idea of what he wants from his paintings. I don't think it is motivated by perfectionism — it's just that he has so much freedom and familiarity with this imaginative world that he is creating.' A few weeks after our studio visit, Toor revealed that he had returned to the mystery man, adjusting his sunglasses and adding a white scarf. The new paintings evoke feelings that ricochet between intimacy and alienation. One azure picture recalls Toor's recent trip to Paris, where friends brought him to a restaurant that seemed more like a tourist trap than haute cuisine. While they laughed themselves to tears, the wait staff glared in frustration. 'It was like a fake fantasy space,' Toor said. 'And they wanted us out of there. We were these three brown guys who were getting drunker and drunker.' Toor enjoys a good laugh; his preoccupation with absurdity is manifested in the pink clown noses that appear throughout his paintings on certain male characters. 'I wanted them to be sort of sad and funny and pathetic,' he said. 'There's something really sweet about them, which makes me feel like I want to help this clown.' He relishes the clown's tragicomic sense of timing, his ability to absorb anxieties and release them as laughter. That is part of why he rolls one of the clown's bulbous noses down the floor in a recent paintings from his 'Fag Puddle' series, which feature globule assemblages of body parts, theatrical costumes and technology melting together like wax candles in the microwave. An earlier example in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view in the contemporary art galleries, is more explicit. It features a man embracing another man's groin as a swirl of body parts, feather boas and pearls surround them. 'Heaps of fabulousness,' as the artist explained. The image serves up a jumbled expression of queer desire and failure — and the strangest part of this dreamy tableau is the smartphone painted onto its periphery, as if the scene was being recorded. Toor explained that his own desire for security comes from the intense feelings of vulnerability growing up in Pakistan. Art history was a refuge in those times. Pictures of time-tested masters like Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens became aspirational, and tracing those images allowed Toor to feel like he was part of something greater. But the new paintings indicate that Toor doesn't need the old masters. His painting has moved on with newfound confidence, rendered in a distinct style. 'I'm part of that story now,' he said.
New York Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Spring, One Mega-Dealer Dominates N.Y.C. Museums
Earlier this month the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated the opening of an exhibition by the painter Amy Sherald — Michelle Obama's official portraitist — with a champagne toast over lush arrangements of daffodils and yellow ranunculus. At the Museum of Modern Art, another recent blowout event honored an ambitious retrospective of the revered painter and sculptor Jack Whitten, who died in 2018. Further uptown, the multimedia art star Rashid Johnson took over the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with a solo show of almost 90 works and live performances. And next month, the conceptual artist Lorna Simpson will debut a major show of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What these in-demand artists have in common is their deep-pocketed Swiss dealer, Hauser & Wirth. The gallery's artists are so dominant in New York's leading museums this season that some in the art world are calling it 'Hauser spring.' Hauser & Wirth's prominence comes at a time when the most powerful dealers in the commercial art world play an increasingly large role in helping support the city's ambitious museum shows. A New York Times analysis of solo exhibitions since 2019 shows that out of 350 exhibitions by contemporary artists, nearly 25 percent went to artists represented by just 11 of the biggest galleries in the world. And within that tiny slice of the art market, the most exhibitions came from Hauser & Wirth artists, with 18 shows over the last six and a half years, outpacing even established names in the American art world like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner. Some experts said the overlap between mega-galleries and major museums is to be expected, considering both groups are eager to spotlight the field's most influential figures. 'These mega-galleries obviously approach artists who are in some ways established,' said Antwaun Sargent, a director at Gagosian. But others warn that such closeness can raise questions of conflicts of interest, since museum shows typically lift the reputations of artists and the prices of their work — and these exhibitions can help their galleries profit handsomely. It represents a shift for museums, which receive their tax-exempt nonprofit status to collect and study art, and present what they believe is important work to the public. For many decades, these institutions were wary of partnerships with the commercial art world. But arts organizations suffered financially during the pandemic. Overhead costs have risen, attendance and corporate funding have fallen, and activists have scrutinized longtime donors, including parts of the Sackler family linked to opioids. For many museums, receiving logistical and, at times, financial support from a major gallery is no longer seen as unpalatable. 'The museums are subsidized by the galleries and the collectors who support those galleries, and it's hard to elbow your way into the lineup if you aren't already included in that circle,' said Robert Storr, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Asking art dealers for money 'used to be taboo,' according to Michael Darling, a curator who founded Museum Exchange, a platform matching prospective art donors with museums. But the old norms have continued to shift. 'These museums are just so desperate to find funding sources, and the galleries are one of the first things they think of,' he said. How Hauser & Wirth Conquered New York Since touching down in the United States in 2009, Hauser & Wirth has evolved into a global juggernaut with 19 locations, including three in Manhattan. Its influence has grown by helping fund exhibitions, recruiting museum curators into key positions and luring top artists from rival galleries. This season, the gallery provided logistical and financial support to the Met, Guggenheim and Whitney shows of its artists, securing loans of artworks from collectors. That translated to credit for its participation on museum websites, alongside foundations and board members. It did not underwrite MoMA's current show by Whitten — that museum, unlike others, said it does not accept funding from art galleries — but it raised his visibility by transporting 40 of his sculptures from the Greek island of Crete, where he had a summer home and studio, to the U.S. nearly a decade ago, so that curators could see them. It was part of the gallery's long-term strategy to promote its artists, which helped lead to Whitten's 2018 retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art and ultimately to the new MoMA show, according to Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, who runs the gallery alongside its co-founders, Iwan and Manuela Wirth. (The Wirths, who are married, also operate Artfarm, a hospitality group with a luxury hotel and restaurants around the world; Manuela is a daughter of the art collector Ursula Hauser and heir to a Swiss retail fortune.) 'Having an institutional presence is the most important aspect for the longevity of an artist's career,' Payot said. He added that financial support was secondary to the logistical help that Hauser & With provides museums, which includes helping curators secure funding and loans from wealthy collectors, organizing parties and funding the production of luxe exhibition catalogs. Museums have different policies that determine what kind of assistance galleries can provide. While MoMA said it does not accept any funding from galleries, institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim do. Ann Bailis, a spokeswoman for the Met, acknowledged that the museum accepts some financial support from galleries though she declined to provide details. She said that 'the museum arranges for loans from institutions and collectors, and occasionally an artist's gallery can be helpful in this process.' (The Met's website for 'Lorna Simpson: Source Notes' cited the 'support' of Hauser & Wirth, among its sponsors.) Ashley Reese, the Whitney's communications director, said that exhibition choices are made independent of possible funding sources. (In addition to providing support to 'Amy Sherald: American Sublime,' Hauser & Wirth is also a co-chair of the Whitney's upcoming gala, its most important fund-raiser of the year.) Payot said it was a coincidence that so many artists on the gallery's roster were having museum exhibitions this spring in New York. 'It is way less about our influence but really a testament to the artists,' he said, noting that the artists had their own relationships with each of the institutions. 'It's easy to be cynical, but it's sincere.' Other museum leaders agreed. 'It wouldn't be fair to accuse the museum-gallery relationship of pure transactionalism,' said Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where Rashid Johnson's show will travel as part of its national tour. She added, 'what we have in common is supporting the outcome that benefits the artist.' But some art historians said the relationship between museums and galleries has shifted in recent decades. Veronique Chagnon-Burke, a chairwoman of the International Art Market Studies Association, said that most modern art museums were founded in the early 20th century and built on relationships between institutions and commercial galleries. Solo exhibitions weren't so important, however, as dealers were more focused on ensuring their artists made it into the permanent collections then taking shape. She said that recently, as corporate funding for exhibitions decreased, wealthy galleries have helped close the budget gaps. The Rise of the Mega-Gallery Mega-galleries represent a tiny but elite share of the art world: Thousands of working artists do not have any gallery representation, and there are more than 760 galleries in New York City alone, according to a 2020 analysis. But artists associated with these behemoth art corporations are more likely to get a prominent platform at New York museums. The Times found that more than half of all solo exhibitions of contemporary artists since 2019 at the Morgan Library & Museum, and 40 percent of similar shows at the Guggenheim Museum, featured artists represented by the largest galleries. At the Met the figure was almost one-third, at MoMA almost one-quarter, and at the Whitney about one-fifth. Smaller institutions, as well as those outside Manhattan, tended to focus on artists with less commercial clout; for example, less than 10 percent of the Brooklyn Museum's contemporary solo exhibitions featured a mega-gallery artist. More than 30 percent of its solo exhibitions were devoted to artists with no gallery ties at the time. Some experts have questioned whether museums are doing enough to introduce audiences to a diverse pool of artists beyond the art stars. As institutions cut back on travel budgets, their curators have fewer opportunities to encounter artists outside of the commercial art world, who can also be a harder sell to museum executives. 'I look at it as miniature acts of heroism by curators who are prepared to say, 'I know this isn't in line with current fashion or this artist isn't going to turn the turnstile widely, but I believe their work merits a fair hearing by our audience,'' said Maxwell Anderson, a former director of the Whitney Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art, and president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which promotes the work of Black artists from the American South. Against the odds, these shows are still happening: Contemporary artists without gallery representation made up 20 percent of all solo exhibitions at top New York museums since 2019, the Times found. But over the last 15 years of the art market's expansion, American museums have become more comfortable working hand-in-hand with galleries, said Ylinka Barotto, a former museum curator who now leads museum relations at Perrotin gallery. 'We don't work in silos anymore,' she said. John Elderfield, MoMA's former chief curator of painting and sculpture, began working with Gagosian in 2012, a few years after leaving the museum, and Ingrid Schaffner of the Chinati Foundation joined Hauser & Wirth in 2023. David Zwirner has operated its own department for museum partnerships since 2022. 'There is no evident line separating commercial galleries and art museums,' Anderson said. 'Galleries have become extremely adept at creating thoroughly researched experiences that museums can't really afford.' With deflated ticket sales and a dwindling list of donors, museums are eager to find alternative sources of capital, said Sally Yerkovich, who teaches museum anthropology at Columbia University and leads revisions for the code of ethics at the International Council of Museums. When deciding who to accept money from, the pre-eminent concern is 'that the sponsors for an exhibition share the values of the museum,' she said. Hauser & Wirth executives said they wanted to cultivate the artistic legacies, and even in a challenging art market, the gallery's influence — as well as that of a select few competitors — shows no signs of waning. In September, one of the newest artists on the dealer's roster, Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the United States at the last Venice Biennale, will unveil a new commission on the Met Museum's facade. The American painter George Condo is getting a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in October. And in South Korea, there are three major museum shows opening for three artists it represents: Mark Bradford, Lee Bul and a 20th-century master of sculpture, Louise Bourgeois. Forget Hauser spring. It may be more accurate to say: It's a Hauser year.
Boston Globe
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
The achingly human art of Michelle Obama's portraitist
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 Advertisement 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/ '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 Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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
