An energetic array of colors greets visitors walking through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition Amy Sherald: American Sublime. From mint greens to velvet lavenders and canary yellows, these are colors you’ve seen before — except not quite like this.
Sherald mixes her individual variants of these hues and carefully catalogs them for future use; her color choices imbue her dazzling paintings with radiance and freshness. She applies contrasting colors with precision. Solid backgrounds make the memorable wardrobes of her subjects pop out vividly, and through her careful arrangement of forms and shapes, Sherald makes each of her portraits distinctive and layered, indicating intricate narratives within.
From the opening, massive triptych Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), the SFMOMA show captures a feeling of Italian Renaissance art. Part of that comes from Sherald’s genius for figuration and detail, bringing to mind the old masters, and part of it is the simplicity and uniformity with which she poses her subjects and arranges her spaces. Sherald’s typical portrait is head-on, from the knees up against a solid background. In less able hands these galleries might easily fall into a dull ubiquity, but here the effect is one of abundance and endless, forking storylines.
“Ecclesia,” a word dating back to ancient Athenian democracy and meaning “a gathering of those summoned,” is a fitting opening gesture for American Sublime. Sherald has explained that her purpose as an artist is to help give Black people their place within the collective consciousness of figures and narratives built up by artists over the centuries. This show summons the many inhabitants of her artistic vocation to see what their gathered presence has to tell us — and what they have to say to one another.
Sherald tends to work roughly on a 1-to-1 scale with the human body, although she is not shy about painting much more monumental figures (many works in this show come in at double that size). In any one gallery, the scale shifts from intimacy to majesty.
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At the beginning of the show, Welfare Queen depicts an impressive, life-sized woman ironically wearing a crown, an empire-waist dress and a sash; at the other end of the room, For Love, and for Country stands up like a billboard. This enormous, iconic re-imagining of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day in Times Square, replaces the original photo’s heterosexual, white couple with two Black sailors kissing.
For Love, and for Country is something of an outlier, as Sherald’s work rarely references the exterior world so directly, even when she is working with highly politicized subjects. One of the distinctive things about this show is how largely ahistorical her paintings feel, even as her subjects’ gestures, wardrobes, and expressions point toward larger social narratives (as do the poetic titles that Sherald gives to her works).
Most portraits have backdrops of little more than color and texture, and even subjects who are more situated are seen amid relatively de-politicized objects like a beach umbrella, a tractor, a slide or a doorway.
It’s interesting, then, to see how Sherald’s approach works when applied to individuals of great political import. If you know anything about Sherald, it’s probably either that she made the official portrait for Michelle Obama while she was first lady, or that her portrait of Breonna Taylor was on the cover of Vanity Fair in the summer of 2020, when COVID lockdowns and uprisings over police brutality seized America’s collective focus.
Show curator Sarah Roberts has been thoughtful in how she has placed these most famous paintings. Obama resides alone in a small alcove behind a freestanding wall, and Taylor prominently inhabits a small gallery where an unobtrusive seat allows for extended contemplation.
Each portrait rewards a patient, supple eye — Obama sits regally before a powder-blue background, the long, flowing skirt of her dress (a work of art itself) forming a kind of pedestal for her arms and torso. The effect is one of coiled strength, intensity mixed with a leonine repose.
Taylor also inhabits a light blue setting, although hers is much more saturated — the blue of a glorious summer afternoon — and unlike Obama she stands, hand perched on her waist, the skirt of her dress dancing around her thighs. The pose might be playful or even flirtatious, except for the look in her eyes, which expresses a weariness far beyond her 26 years.
Opposite Taylor stands the very large A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, in which a woman in a blue off-the-shoulder dress leans up against her bicycle, daisies dancing in her basket before a picket fence. It is to my eye the show’s most optimistic piece: a summer treat. The lush and soft greenery in the distance speaks of easiness and vibrancy. One wonders at the juxtaposition of the two young women in blue dresses — one embodying a tragic story, the other seemingly so full of potential.
The show concludes with a gesture drenched in American history. In the towering work Trans Forming Liberty, a trans woman wearing a blue gown holds a torch capped not with flames but flowers. Sherald says part of her intent was to explicitly state that trans Americans deserve the rights and freedoms guaranteed to all citizens.
It is, unfortunately, a very necessary statement at a time when Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has introduced legislation to ban trans women from women’s bathrooms and locker rooms on federal property. This follows a similar measure the Congresswoman introduced to regulate the use of facilities on the House side of the U.S. Capitol — all of it a direct response to the election of America’s first out trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, from Delaware.
The right’s attack on trans rights — and Sherald’s painting — brings to mind Sen. Jesse Helms’ 1993 harassment of the country’s first Black senator, Carol Moseley Braun. As Moseley Braun stepped into an elevator with Helms and Sen. Orrin Hatch, Helms began to sing what’s known as the national anthem of the Confederacy. “I’m going to make her cry,” Helms said. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”
Ultimately, Trans Forming Liberty conveys dignity, resilience and a vulnerability that comes with knowing you’re on display. This is the one form of ubiquity that I would argue rests over American Sublime. These are paintings that look back at us just as much as we stare into them — not necessarily in a confrontational way, but as testimony, as though Sherald’s subjects are saying, “come and meet my gaze.”
It is a tool very familiar to the marginalized, to ask that those who hold power over us must come face-to-face with who we are and what their power has brought upon our lives. Amy Sherald is absolutely the right artist to facilitate these gatherings and encounters.
