Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Written by:
Emily S. Mendel
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Amy Sherald, best known for her iconic portrait of Michelle Obama, displayed in this exhibit, may seem like an overnight sensation. Still, she’s been a working artist for almost twenty years. Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973 and now living and working in the New York City area, Amy Sherald uses large, striking, colorful portraits to express her image of the contemporary African American experience.


“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Sherald’s work to date. On display are nearly 50 of her paintings completed from 2007 to the present. The show includes her early works as well as the perceptive figurative paintings for which she is best known.
Sherald’s realistic style involves large portraits of Black subjects with gray skin tones surrounded by rich, colorful backgrounds. She employs grayscale to alleviate the racial content in her art — so the viewer can react to the subjects without regard to their skin color and see them solely as part of American life.


Some of her paintings just blew me away. Her artistry, use of color, humor, perception of history, and reinvention of American life is stunning and novel. For example, Sherald’s 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was fatally shot by police in Louisville, Kentucky, after officers invaded her home, was commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine for the cover of its September 2020 issue. The portrait accompanied an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he interviewed Breonna Taylor’s mother.


Sherald portrayed Breonna Taylor wearing a pale blue dress with a similar blue background. She said, “There’s something about blue that’s very powerful, that’s very spiritual, that’s very otherworldly, but, yet of the earth. It’s infinite in its capacity to hold energy. . . . It didn’t confine her. I wanted people to feel that she was floating inside of a space that you could be in as well as stand outside of, and just have your moment of solace.”


The 10-foot tall, colorful, and romantic For Love, and for Country suggests Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous 1945 photograph “V-J Day in Times Square” of a white sailor kissing a white woman. Sherald, in a call-out to the recriminations against the LGBTQ+ community, painted the kiss as between two Black men.
Don’t miss the triptych at the beginning of the exhibition. The work, “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” was just completed in the last few months. It’s three separate but related paintings, each of a person wistfully gazing out of the window/door of a fanciful beach hut.
Sherald makes elaborate preparations before painting each of her portraits. She thinks about them, sometimes for years, chooses a subject and their clothing, then takes a photograph from which she paints the final product. There are allusions to history of art, film, poetry, humor, and American history in her work and their titles. Sherald’s unique style can be appreciated on many levels. But mainly, she wants her viewers not to accept clichéd notions of race and allow African American artists and subjects into the larger American art conversation.

By Emily S. Mendel
emilymendel@gmail.com
©Emily S. Mendel 2024 All Rights Reserved

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