A Wonderful Dream, the first solo exhibition by Amy Sherald.
In A Wonderful Dream, Sherald employs race to explore the evolution of one’s identity as a reaction to external directives. Born in Georgia in 1973 and now based in Baltimore, she credits her early years negotiating as a minority in a mostly white community as a major influence on her practice. Inspired by artists such as Bo Bartlett, Barkley Hendricks, and Kerry James Marshall, she paints dynamic portraits, designed to divulge an erudite understanding of the psychological consequences of stereotyping and racism.
Being Themselves: The Portrait Paintings of Amy Sherald
Essay by Dawoud Bey, June 2016
“My work began as an exploration to exclude the idea of color as race from my paintings by removing “color” but still portraying racialized bodies as objects to be viewed through portraiture.” –Amy Sherald
Amy Sherald’s paintings don’t just stay politely on the wall. They push into the viewers’ space, creating an experience that is both an experience of the painted object, but more deeply, an intimate engagement with the subjects inhabiting her work. I say inhabiting because of the palpable sense of physical presence with which she imbues them. The fundamental trope in the making of portraiture is to create a psychological and emotional experience of the depicted subject that is credible enough that the viewer then begins to have an experience of the subject that in some ways transcends its quality as an object. Through idiosyncratic gestural nuance, direction of the gaze, and something which might be called “the fullness of human description,” we become almost involuntarily engaged.
Sherald brings all of these devices to bear on black bodies, which changes something, if not everything. What changes are the ways that the history of the representation of black subject in visual culture is equal to the heightened and fraught social narrative of race. Here in the States, that narrative begins in the South, where the shape of that contentious relationship between blacks and whites was first forged. The institution of slavery, with its construct of the black body being solely a tool of forced labor and sexual exploitation was of necessity subjected to a radical and necessary reworking when the institution of slavery was abolished. But while the institution itself may have been abolished, the toxic residue of misshapen racial relationships, and their forms of representations, continued.
Thus the visual representation of blacks has long been a field of considerable contestation, since the social relations—whether subjugation or tragically diminished human respect—were telegraphed to the larger public via their visual corollaries. And thus the stereotypical images of blacks that pervaded the public arena for centuries, and were meant to justify first slavery and later still racist intransigence and dismissal of black autonomy, were created. These images were contradicted, of course, by the actual lived experiences of black people as they knew themselves to be. But the portraits that occupied black homes, on mantle places and nightstands, did not have a visible public manifestation. If they had, the institutions that were buttressed by racism and a false projection of black inferiority would have crumbled.
Amy Sherald was born and raised in the south, a fact that is central to both her identity and her work. As the original hotbed of America’s troubled and tangled crucible of black and white relations, the south exacted a code of behavior from its black citizens that was central to not only their very survival but also their sense of self. How to raise children in that genteel environment of freighted and caustic racial paradox; children who were secure in their own dignified sense of self, graceful in their own self-possession, but clear about the contexts in which they must suppress that while wearing the mask of benign and deferential obsequiousness? Once in the public arena, outside of the confines and safety of the home, a clear sense of the differences between being oneself and being who one needed to be in order to survive was crucial. So Sherald, as a daughter of the south, grew up with an inherited and keen sense of the tension between the real and the performative. Her paintings occupy a place of tension somewhere in between the two.
Sherald’s paintings are not based on a meticulous restatement of the facts; they are not descended from the photo-realist tradition. They are rather her own inventions, based on an actual person who she meets and photographs, yet not literally about that person. Met in the course of various social interactions, these subjects are reinvented through the material and conceptual frame of Sherald’s intentions. Isolated from any clear social space, they are thus unmoored from the dictates of sociology and free to become characters animated in Sherald’s own subjective retelling and reshaping of the black subject. Often posed and holding objects whose meanings are largely allegorical, the subjects have one foot in the real world and another in a space of Sherald’s own making. While the resulting narratives and the absence of a literal skin color, along with the heightened color palette applied to their garments and objects are meant to transport the viewer to a place of the imagination, the exquisitely rendered idiosyncratic gestures and knowingly described folds and drapes of their inhabited garments pull us into a space of credible experience. The tension between these two entities—the imagined and the illusionary real—sits at the center of Sherald’s rigorous practice as a painter. Whether in the suggested heavy weight of the casually opened coat in Pilgrimage of the Chameleon, 2016 or the tilt of the head and placement of the hands in The Make Believer (Monet’s Garden), 2016, Sherald understands and amplifies the devices of human presence and behavior that enlivens the paintings, even as they implicate the viewer in a relationship with the subjects of these paintings.
And the titles! Just as the gaze of the subjects toward the viewer implicates the viewer, and catches some of those viewers in the uncomfortable web of their own suppositions, the titles more fully call this out. So just what were you thinking as you viewed these imaginary lavishly painted black figures who have become a very real presence on Sherald’s canvasses? Depending on what you may be thinking, the titles should give you pause and cause you to revisit the subject and their place in your imagination. Perhaps the titles will give you cause to check yourself. Thus the titles are as much a part of the conceptual construct of Sherald’s work as the painted figures themselves.
In the end, Amy Sherald’s subjects are simply being themselves, in all of their exquisitely engaging and provocatively rendered ordinariness. But within the freighted firmament of American social and aesthetic discourse, can black folks ever just simply be themselves, without qualification? Without some dissonance? Amy Sherald’s arresting paintings keep these questions reverberating, even as they keep us deeply and complexly engaged.
