Brush with criticism doesn’t faze artist
Many people didn’t get her Obama portrait, and to her, that’s just fine
CHICAGO—Amy Sherald has heard the complaints about her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama.
“Why is she grey?” “It doesn’t look like her.” They came up again as the artist appeared in a public forum recently at Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank. At the sold-out event to unveil the new book “The Obama Portraits,” one of her questioners even brought up the instant, sharp reaction of Black Twitter, which, like most Twitter demographics, is not shy in its judgments.
“I feel like anything that comes along with something that’s very public is going to bring along some criticism,” Sherald told the audience. “So I was ready for it. I thought I was ready for it. But after 48 hours ... I was like, ‘People are crazy.’”
She has heard the complaints and she is not budging.
“Some people like their poetry to rhyme. Some people don’t,” was her most succinct summary. “That’s fine. It’s cool.”
Still, she “saw a lot of opportunity” in the reaction, she said. “When I had time to respond to the emails, a lot of the people just had not engaged with art at all. And they’re like, ‘You have a first lady who is a Black woman, and she should have black skin.’ To me when you see brown skin, it tends to codify something. So through the grey you’re almost allowed to look past that into the real person.”
Then, too, there is the live impact of the painting, monumental at 1.8 metres tall by 1.5 metres wide, versus a little snapshot of it seen on a screen. The cool colours warm up, as does the subject itself, famous for her ability to project vivacity in public settings. At the same time there is a guardedness in her face, a sense of the private person she has been holding back, of the work it has taken to be a beloved first lady.
And then, against a wall that appears beige, as in the famous photograph of Parker Curry, the young African-American girl staring up at the portrait as a museum guard watches, Obama’s skin, those famously toned arms, do begin to take on shades of brown, at least from a certain angle.
“A lot of people were like, ‘I didn’t like it and then went to go see it.’ And they wrote me back to say, ‘It made me cry,’” Sherald told the crowd.
“Because it has a visual effect that it does not carry on Instagram.”
Sherald also knows that the criticism is just one subset of the reaction. She has also gone into the room where it hangs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington,
D.C., seen the enthusiasm for hers and Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of president Barack Obama, still, some two years after they were unveiled. They have roughly doubled attendance at the museum, according to NPG officials.
“It’s become something that’s almost really sacred,” she said in an interview before the public forum. “I’ve kind of invisibly hung out there while people were looking. It’s almost like when you walk into one of those spaces where you’re like” — she moves to a whisper — “‘I’m whispering, but I’m not sure why I’m whispering.’ But you kind of feel like you should, like you’ve entered into a different space.”
She was talking not only about the continued warm reception for the works but for her hopes when they begin their recently announced and first-ever tour, which, like the launching of the Smithsonian book, will begin in Chicago, the city that started the Obamas’ political career, at the Art Institute in June 2021.
“As long as it continues to hold its historical value and weight, I think it’s a great idea,” she said of the tour.
Asked if going to see the public reacting to the paintings was like a filmmaker slipping into the back row at one of her movies, Sherald said, “I mean, I would have to be there for other stuff, but I would just kind of go up and stand around because, I don’t know, I’m nosy. But it was nice to see people really enjoy it and hear what they were saying sometimes.”
Those paintings, it is fair to say, are the most famous and far-reaching contemporary art works made in America this century.
And they exist, Duke University art history professor Richard Powell told the Stony Island crowd, because their subjects had the courage to go for something beyond standard presidential portraiture.
They chose Wiley, already well known for his aggrandizing portraits of pop-culture figures, and Sherald, growing in artworld stature for her incisive, cool-toned portraits of every day African-Americans, because they wanted more than just likenesses of themselves, said Powell, whose essay in the book attempts to place the paintings in art history.
Wiley’s Barack Obama, of course, is immediately warmer, seated, looking presidential, in a suit but not a tie, but — surprisingly — amid, almost one with, a fore- and background of ivy decorated with flowers representing his biography.
“It speaks volumes that president Obama and first lady Michelle Obama chose Kehinde and Amy,” Powell said, “because what it says it that not only did they want really, really accomplished portraits, but they also wanted important works of contemporary art.”
Powell thanks the rise of the ubiquitous phone-based camera for some of the resonance the Obama portraits have had. “I think perhaps it’s the popularity of photography that has made these paintings special and extraordinary in many people’s eyes,” he said in a subsequent interview. “Unlike a very, very flat, shiny photograph, with something on canvas you can see the paint, and sometimes it’s high gloss and sometimes it’s matte, and sometimes you can see the brush strokes, and the sheer scale and the framing devices, the painters’ compositions — all of that I think really captured people’s imaginations, along with the mystique of president Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.”