Michelle Obama, ever the tastemaker, made big news last month when she chose Baltimore artist Amy Sherald to paint her official portrait for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
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While Sherald has already received plenty of critical notice (and a $25,000 prize from the National Portrait Gallery for winning last year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition) she’s been vaulted from a relatively quiet existence into the international spotlight with Mrs. Obama’s choice.
Lisa Melandri, executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, didn’t learn about Sherald courtesy of the Obama portrait. In fact, she had already lined up Sherald’s first major solo exhibition, at CAM this coming May, when she learned about the portrait through a Google alert, just like everyone else.
“The first time I saw one of these paintings, I fell in love and wanted to see more,” Melandri says. “If I was having that experience, audiences would have it.”
Of course, the timing of Mrs. Obama’s announcement is a nice touch.
“It’s really exciting!” Melandri says. “I think it couldn’t be a better choice for Michelle Obama.”
Melandri says she’s thrilled to be assembling a proliferation of Sherald’s works into a single show.
“I’m somebody who has come across her work over the years and been floored by it,” she says. “I wanted to understand a little bit more about her by seeing these works in concert with one another, in dialogue with one another. All of these people could come together and fill the gallery with their presence. You as the viewer are in the mix—you’re gazing at them, they’re looking back at you.”
Sherald’s portraits are distinctive images of (thus far) everyday black people she meets. She renders black skin in striking, almost monochromatic grey tones. The artist told the New York Times that she photographs subjects outside in natural light before painting, and that her process is slow and meticulous.
“It’s that kind of portraiture which is the most accessible,” Melandri says. “It really sits with you. It lives with you after you’ve seen one of these paintings.”
Melandri mentions Sherald’s habit of adding almost Surrealist touches into her works: In the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition winning work “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” a woman in immaculate white gloves and a red fascinator frankly regards the viewer while holding a teacup whose size is just south of absurd. Backgrounds and clothing serve as their own graphic elements.
“It’s in that combination, between how carefully wrought the faces are—they have a realness to them, we feel like we know the sitter—and the more abstracted elements of the prop or the clothing,” says Melandri. “They really do stand out as they kind of pop forth from the canvas, and that handling, that combination, is just extraordinary.”
Melandri points out that portrait makers throughout history have had a variety of strategies. Are the images meant to be simple photorealistic depictions, or is there more to say? Sherald, Melandri says, communicates much in a single image.
“She’s not interested in saying ‘This is Nancy, this is how old she is and where I saw her,’” the curator says.
The portraits Sherald has created thus far may not be explicit in answering those questions.
“Could it be from a different time, a different place?” Melandri asks. “That too makes them very iconic, it sort of universalizes and makes poetic who these sitters are.”
Sherald’s sitters resonate as known, even though we don’t personally know the people in the pictures, says Melandri. With a subject like Michelle Obama, whose likeness we all know and whose personality we all have some notions about, Sherald’s painstaking treatment can’t help but be intensely revealing.
Besides being a great coup for CAM, the show will sprinkle stardust on three local artists. CAM’s Great Rivers Biennial will also be on display, which means the work of Addoley Dzegede, Sarah Paulsen, and Jacob Stanley will be in dialogue with Sherald’s—and will be seen by the crowds drawn to Sherald’s work. (For the last Biennial, the winners shared space with Mark Bradford.)
The exhibition, which opens May 11, 2018, will include works borrowed from collectors and other institutions, as well as some new works made especially for the show. This far out, it’s not certain what specific works might be in the show.
“I have a feeling we will be heavily visited during this time,” Melandri says.
So do we.
