Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
From November 16th, 2024, to March 9th, 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is hosting the largest-ever collection of Amy Sherald oil-on-canvas paintings. The exhibit, titled Amy Sherald: American Sublime, displays nearly 50 portraits, from 2007 to 2024, of mostly everyday black Americans, consistent with her desire to engage viewers in a more complex understanding of American identity. Best known for her 2018 portrait of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, which usually hangs at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Amy Sherald directly addresses the notorious absence of black men, women, and children, in American portraiture. Her portraits are radiant, and only temporal in the way her subjects are dressed and positioned to tell a story.
A video of her work, included in the exhibit, shows the elaborate photoshoots and staging of her portraits, using actors. For example, the show’s poster--Any Sherald’s 2022 painting For love and for country, depicting two queer sailors kissing-- is directly reminiscent of the world-famous (1945) photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, titled V-J Day in Times Square. A portrait where, in fact, the 1945 kissing subjects were simply swapped and replaced by the two kissing queer black men, on a brilliant turquoise background. In Any Sherald's take, the two subjects, in the exact same position, are also completely oblivious of the world, as they claim their love. Love also, in 2022, of a more tolerant, red, white and blue country, shown with the blue striped shirt, red bandana and white sailor hat.
Amy Sherald identifies with a tradition of American realism represented by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. But her realism celebrates the sublime individual, vibrantly cloaked. Plus, Amy Sherald quotes extensively from such black literary geniuses as Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison for the titles* complementing her portraits. For example, from Morrison’s Beloved, she titles two of her 2015 portraits: Freeing herself was one thing, taking ownership of that freed self was another and Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.
After the San Francisco MOMA, the show moves on to the Whitney Museum, in New York City.
*Portrait titles from top to bottom: Grand Dame Queenie (2013), Precious jewels by the sea (2019), For love and for country (2022), Kingdom (2023), Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018), The bathers (2015), A god blessed land (Empire of Dirt) (2022), They call me Redbone but I'd rather be Strawberry Shortcake (2009), Untitled (2018), Breonna Taylor (2020), The boy with no past (2014), When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be (Self-imagined atlas)(2018).
References
Amy Sherald: American Sublime.
Exhibit at the SF MOMA, November 16 to March 9, 2024.
Chan, C. (Sept. 2024). Quiet Beauty: Amy Sherald’s American Art. SF MOMA.
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/quiet-beauty-amy-sheralds-american-art/
Amy Sherald: American Sublime.
Exhibit at the SF MOMA, November 16 to March 9, 2024.
Chan, C. (Sept. 2024). Quiet Beauty: Amy Sherald’s American Art. SF MOMA.
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/quiet-beauty-amy-sheralds-american-art/
More from the scene of That Famous V-J Day Kiss in Times Square. Life Magazine.
https://www.life.com/history/v-j-day-kiss-times-square/
https://www.life.com/history/v-j-day-kiss-times-square/
Smith, R. (Sept. 12, 2019). Amy Sherald's shining second act. NYTimes.
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