Amy Sherald’s American Sublime
Once scheduled to be on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait gallery, Amy Sherald’s American Sublime is now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art after the artist pulled the exhibit from the Smithsonian, asserting that she could not “comply with a culture of censorship” Read the full article on the exhibition from our recent issue, after it premiered at the SFMOMA by Clayton Schuster below. You can still get the full issue, Hi-Fructose Issue 73 from us here. The show at the Baltimore Museum of Art has set record attendance levels.
All images are courtesy of SFMOMA, Hauser & Worth, and the artist.
ABOVE: “A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt)”, 96 1/8” x 130 1/8” x 2 1/2” (244.1 cm x 330.5 cm x 6.4 cm), oil on linen, 2022, © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Amy Sherald is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of figurative painting in America. There is a major solo exhibition of her work on display now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Editor’s note: It’s now at the Baltimore museum of Art]. The show helps us understand Sherald’s work to date and places her at the vanguard of artists documenting the American project and the peoples that make up this great experiment in democracy. Early pieces denote when she first developed her signature style. There are of course the famous works—the portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor. And then there is the otherwise. All of which comprise the paintings that help us understand both her development and the masterful depth and urgency of her vision.
The name of the show—American Sublime—helps us find a way into conversation with Sherald’s oeuvre. This exhibition, and Sherald’s work broadly, is about America today. And more specifically, the experiences of Black folks.
Stylistically, her work also acts as a corrective. It brings the stories and lived experiences of Black Americans onto museum walls, before the eyes of curators and patrons. She sees her work as extending the documentary project of artists like Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Grant Wood, and others of the American Realist ilk. And while those celebrated artists recorded the vernaculars of (mostly white) Americana during a particular era, Sherald uses that same model to bring the hopes and dreams and yearnings of Black folks within the scope of what we talk about when we talk about America, the American dream, and that particularly American mission statement summed up as the pursuit of happiness.
When we talk about Sherald’s work, however, the first reach is most often to understand the grayness of the skin.
In interviews, Sherald implies that desaturating the skin helps drive our conception of the figure away from the politics and social constructs around race and toward a more intimate interaction with the person. Wesley Moore in The New York Times summed up this quality of Sherald’s work as “blackness without the gaze of whiteness.”
ABOVE, LEFT: “For Love, and for Country”, 123 1/4” x 93 1/8” x 2 1/2” (313.2 cm x 236.5 cm x 6.4 cm), oil on linen, 2022, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab; © Amy Sherald; photo: Don Ross
ABOVE, RIGHT: “They Call Me Redbone, But I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake”, 54” x 43” x 2 1/2” (137.2 cm x 109.2 cm x 6.4 cm), oil on canvas, 2009, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, MD, in honor of the artist and the twenty-fifth anniversary of National Museum of Women in the Arts; © Amy Sherald; photo: Lee Stalsworth, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Sherald bends this arc inward. She shows that the interior life of the human creature is as deep and profound as anything we meet in the natural world or try to achieve in society.
Everything that surrounds the skin is colorful, or at least stark. A black and white houndstooth print, for instance, lacks color but has a starkness that contrasts against the soft grays with which she treats flesh. Hats, objects, backgrounds, everything is brightly colored. And yet it’s a testament to Sherald’s craft that the prismatic surroundings only serve to draw us into the face, the eyes.
And in the moment that we sink into the character’s eyes we feel like they become a person. Race is an experience that society curates, a roadmap for living that culture tries to force on us and enforce at scale. The people in Sherald’s paintings are Black, but their Blackness is not their beginning, their end, or their definition. They are boundless, unburdened. They are real and they are inquisitive and they dream.
THE PEOPLE IN SHERALD’S PAINTINGS ARE BLACK, BUT THEIR BLACKNESS IS NOT THEIR BEGINNING, THEIR END, OR THEIR DEFINITION.
In Sherald’s words as noted in the show’s catalog, her figures are “quiet, but not passive.”
And we can learn a little more about what she means here by listening to the music of her titles. She titles her works in puns, in quotes of poetry and literature, with the inextricable qualities that underly the painting.
“Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own” from 2016 is taken from a poem by Lucille Clifton.
“Try on dreams until I find the one that fits me. They all fit me” from 2017 is, as far as I know, original to Sherald. But what other language could capture the stance, the gesture, the clear-eyed fierceness of the subject?
“A Midsummer Afternoon Dream” from 2017 plays on the name of Shakespeare’s romance in title, and then quotes from the iconography of The Wizard of Oz in the content. Seemingly recasting Dorothy as someone modern, perhaps closer to middle age, and Black. The white picket fence and large two-story house right there, nearby for her taking. One of the foundational guarantees of the American dream ready for her taking, or already-having.
And from there we can start to think about the sublime.
The sublime from a western art historical view has been a way to describe man’s encounters with the bigness of nature. Or maybe our smallness against the majesty of the natural world. Our being a part of but inherently separate from the natural world. And the promise that it would tame or humble human civilization if we did not tame or humble it first. Awe, perhaps.
ABOVE, LEFT: Amy Sherald portrait, photo: Olivia Lifungula, courtesy Hauser & Wirth
OPPOSITE: “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama”, 72 1/8” x 60 1/8” x 2 3/4” (183.1 cm x 152.7cm x 7.1 cm), oil on linen, 2018, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia; courtesy the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery
BELOW, LEFT: “If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It”, 130” x 108″ x 2 1/2” (330.2 cm x 274.3 cm x 6.4 cm), oil on linen, 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee, Sascha S. Bauer, Jack Cayre, Nancy Carrington Crown, Nancy Poses, Laura Rapp, and Elizabeth Redleaf; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
BELOW, RIGHT: “Kingdom”, 117 1/8” x 92 x 2 1/2” (297.4 cm x 233.7 cm x 6.4 cm), oil on linen, 2022, The Broad Art Foundation
Sherald bends this arc inward. She shows that the interior life of the human creature is as deep and profound as anything we meet in the natural world or try to achieve in society.
She takes us to the region of personal mythologies. The places where the unconscious forms our dreams. The subterranean continents within us that are as dark and inaccessible as the ocean but, like the ocean floor, a foundation for, or a stage uplifting our actions here in the bright and waking world.
We live amid currents of brutality and beauty that smash and mingle and churn around the world. As those currents crash and catch us in their tumult, all we can do is to continue living and continue dreaming and continue being good. To ourselves and to each other.
The sublime is all around us—and within us as well. It shines upon us and from within. Sherald captures it from that latter angle. She shows how we can shine amid the brutality of the world. Accepting that which we cannot change and also accepting the challenge to believe in rightness, goodness, and justice.
There’s so much more to contemplate in Sherald’s work. American Sublime at SFMOMA (and off to the East Coast afterward) is a great prism through which we can begin to understand this important artist’s vision and apply it to our own lived experiences.*
BELOW, LEFT: “The Bathers”, 72 1/8” x 67” (183.1 cm x 170.2 cm), oil on canvas, 2015 private collection; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
BELOW, RIGHT: “Breonna Taylor”, 54” x 43” (137.2 cm x 109.2 cm), oil on linen, 2020, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, purchase made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, purchase made possible by a gift from Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg/The Hearthland Foundation; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
This article originally appeared in Hi-fructose issue 73, You can still get the full issue, Hi-Fructose Issue 73 from us here. Sherald’s American Sublime show at the Baltimore Museum of Art has set record attendance levels.
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