Amy Sherald became famous for painting Michelle Obama, a first among First Ladies. That was also Sherald’s first and so far unrepeated celebrity commission; her true and abiding topic remains, in her bland phrase, “everyday people” — lots of them. Just who is an everyday person? (As distinct, presumably from a special-occasion person, or an only-for-company person.) Am I? Are you? I wonder how many of the four dozen personalities who populate Sherald’s current Whitney retrospective American Sublime would describe themselves that way, or accept the condescending adjective in the introductory text: “ordinary”.
The implication of such language is that by plucking her sitters out of the crowd, Sherald discovers their hidden specialness, or else confers a quality they lack. The Whitney show suggests the opposite, though: her subjects may not start out ordinary, but they are by the time she’s done with them.
We learn almost nothing about the individuals whose faces and outfits she renders with a kind of distorting realism. They may be heroic, kind, lunatic, brilliant, pious or cruel, in various idiosyncratic combinations, but the only quality we can be sure they have in common is Blackness.
In almost all her paintings, the subject stands in the centre of the frame against a solid ground and faces the viewer head on. Their stares are blank, their expressions serious, their faces smooth as glazed stoneware. The women (and most are women) flaunt bright, colourful prints, and the men wear hats or carry accessories, such as a bouquet of balloons or a fishing rod.
Everyone’s skin is grey, as in a black-and-white photo. That technique, meant to divert attention from the sitters’ race, winds up making them homogeneous. Whoever these folks are in the rest of their lives, on canvas they become Amy Sheralds.
She labels herself an “American realist”, and the museum cites a selective list of white forebears, including Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Alice Neel and Andrew Wyeth. Curator Rujeko Hockley fleshes out that list with a few Black predecessors, like William H Johnson, Archibald Motley and Laura Wheeler Waring (all featured in the Metropolitan Museum’s recent Harlem Renaissance exhibition). There’s a much more obvious model, though: Barkley L Hendricks, whose name barely comes up.
Like Sherald (except half a century earlier), Hendricks photographed Black men and women whose body language, attitude or clothes caught his eye. Then he elaborated the results in oil, placing the figures against bright, blank backdrops. But where Hendricks’s people possess a crackling cool, Sherald’s tend to look stiff, even bored.
It’s the clothes that come to life, draping, undulating, and energising the static bodies they adorn. “Grande Dame Queenie” (2012) lifting a teacup clear of her enormous yellow bow tie; the teen in an Avengers T-shirt and yellow-striped hoodie in “Innocent You, Innocent Me” (2016); the lady in the leopard skin coat in “As Soft as She Is . . .” (2022) — a decade’s worth of characters all parade by like paper dolls in swappable outfits.
Sherald had an early epiphany. Aged 11, on a school trip to the museum in her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, she saw Bo Bartlett’s “Object Permanence” and was thunderstruck by the image of a Black dad — one of those “everyday people,” I suppose — standing with his white family in front of their small brick house. The fact that a member of her race could inhabit a big canvas was more discombobulating to her than the notion that she could paint one. All these years later, that revelation has yielded a paradox: in spotlighting Black men, women, and the occasional child, she also makes them generic.
Sherald’s appeal as a portraitist lies not in her psychological insights, but in the graphic boldness that has landed her works on the covers of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Smithsonian magazine. Her celebration of Breonna Taylor, the young woman killed by police in her home in 2020, is a symphony in aqua. The most memorable aspect of her First Lady portrait is the gown, a cascade of white silk ornamented in yellow, red, pink and black geometries. As for the greyscale face, it doesn’t particularly resemble Michelle Obama’s, and certainly doesn’t evoke her mixture of wit, reserve and incandescence.
You can watch the artist as art director in a video that records the making of “For Love, and For Country” (2022), a restaging of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day photograph of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square. Sherald ushers two models into her studio, one wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, the other a blue-and-white striped tee. She hands them each a white sailor’s cap, adjusts their poses, and snaps dozens of photos, until she’s found the version she wants to paint from.
The couple who found themselves joined forever on the pages of Life magazine in 1945 clutched one another with an urgency bordering on violence. Sherald’s models, on the other hand, embrace tenderly, and their kiss feels artful. The self-conscious symbolism is hard to miss, but just in case it needs drumming in, a text panel obliges. The artist, it informs us, “reflects on the Black soldiers who returned from the war to a still-segregated society, and advocates for a more nuanced understanding of masculinity”.
Sherald seems to have started feeling the limitations of her approach. Recently, she’s been producing tableaux big enough to elevate vignettes into dramatic scenes. In “As American as Apple Pie” (2020), a couple pose in front of a yellow wood-framed house, like a Black “American Gothic” or a remake of “Object Permanence”. The pair come equipped with all the appurtenances of consumer life: white picket fence, two-toned 1970s classic car, immaculately white Converse All Stars for him, a pink Barbie T-shirt and matching high-heeled sandals for her. You could practically annotate the thing with price tags.
There’s a deadpan quality to this work that makes it hard to parse. Despite the suggestion of snideness in the title, it’s not obviously a critique of acquisitive pleasures, or a comment on shallow values, or a parable of precarious belonging. Instead, it just looks like a picture of two Americans who have what they want because they were able to buy it. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s a still-life of objects posing with their owners — a portrait of a lifestyle, rather than the people who adopt it.
April 9-August 10, whitney.org
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