Representation can be a funny - either perplexing or hysterical - thing to contemplate. Especially when you think about doing so as a New Yorker born & raised when subway tokens were still around but nearly on the way out. Being in this city sometimes, the changes have occurred make the bones and the heart ache. And talking about it often can render you unseen, at least to those who are signing leases and building high-rises where playgrounds and candy stores once were.
But being seen amid all of this change, is what we all strive for. And when someone exerts the ability to see you in ways you hadn’t thought of, especially through art, it can sort of open you up as one does with a fresh summer watermelon. That’s the feeling I had when I left the Amy Sherald: American Sublime exhibition at the Whitney Museum of the Arts two weeks ago.
After getting caught up in the day to day of work and a fun but loaded travel schedule, I made my way to see the exhibit in its last weekend, choosing Saturday even though I was set to catch Raekwon at Prospect Park later that afternoon and because Sunday was sold out of free tickets. As I walked over to the Whitney on what was a glorious day, I took note of how there weren’t any protesters outside of the Tesla dealership. I felt a twinge of sadness as I walked by the now boarded-up Hector’s Diner at Little West 12th Street. It was there for 76 years, a mainstay for the night owls, fashionistas, and all the other characters who haunt the Meatpacking District. Past that, the Shake Shack was doing okay business.
I looped around the corner onto Gansevoort Street and saw "Four Ways of Being" perched on the building. The four portraits of Black men arrayed in striking outfits, exuding calm amid varying colorful backdrops heightened my excitement for the exhibit as much as seeing the number of shining Black and Brown faces also making their way into the museum. A guard told me, “You’re smart coming today because tomorrow is going to be a madhouse.”
The first major survey of Sherald’s work rightfully drew a huge crowd, and the Whitney curators did well with the placement of her fifty works in the gallery to let one’s eyes lead them to each painting and be taken in. Each Black person in Sherald’s paintings are done in grisialle, a technique where varying shades of grey (sometimes black) is used to convey more depth in the composition. Sherald gained heightened recognition when she was tapped to do the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. I’ve seen the portrait at least four times, and while I appreciate how well she captured Obama’s poignant stature and expression, I do feel there is more of a flattened appearance overall as critics have suggested; distance with this painting gives it more drama.
Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor affected me, in that it was a regal and gentle depiction of the young emergency medical technician who was slain in a botched raid by Louisville, Kentucky police officers in 2020. The seafoam color of her dress and the background pulled my eyes in. I saw at least two Black mothers and daughters take pictures of it, and just stare. Thinking potentially about themselves at that age. The diversity of the subjects in American Sublime moved me,as I’m sure it did for most of those who ventured to visit the show.
The lightning rod of the exhibition (more on that later), “Trans Forming Liberty”, was in full towering view on the wall in a quiet corner of the exhibition space directly across from another tall painting, “For Love, and For Country” featuring a Black gay couple re-enacting the famous kiss between a sailor and a nurse in Times Square in 1945 at the end of World War II between the U.S. and Japan.“Trans Forming Liberty” is the painting that became a target for President Donald Trump and his ignorant irascibility due to it featuring a transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty. It was due to be the first exhibit by a Black contemporary artist at the National Portrait Gallery, but when informed that the museum was considering removing that painting from the exhibit, Sherald decided to withdraw her show. It will instead be at the Baltimore Museum of Art beginning in November.
American Sublime struck me the most in the people and the serenity around them that she painted. Serenity and stability in the way that each portrait greeted you. I felt that in two paintings - one depicting a woman in a flowing summer dress leaning against a bicycle in front of a white picket fence, and the other of a man seated on the construction girders of a building. Sherald’s usage of bright contrasting colors, to me, compel you to focus on the features of each grisaille portrait intently. To see their presence take up space. And that is at the heart of the exhibit. In her letter to the Smithsonian, she wrote: “Portraiture has always been my way of asserting presence — of creating visibility where there has too often been erasure.”
It was a display that stuck with me throughout the weekend, recalling the expressions of each portrait subject vividly. American Sublime, if you can check it out, allows one to see another way that presence can be represented on walls and all around us, even in a climate and government working to erase it however they can.