“American Sublime is a salve. It’s a call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen,” Amy Sherald said of the exhibition that feels like a family reunion around each corner. It is indeed a sight for sore eyes, tired of seeing the same racialized narratives play out.
Hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Art, it does theopoetic justice to the unseen in that I never saw a stranger. Thirty-eight paintings created from 2007 to the present, I wanted to put them all in my wallet and take them home with me.
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, most of the paintings are hung at eye level; this is not art positioned to be pedestalized and looked up to.
Roberts wrote in a book named after the exhibition, “While these depictions must be understood within the context of centuries of violence against and negation of Black people in the United States, Sherald offers them as a counter-representation of Black life, one that speculates, what if? What if we hold all this history and conjure an entirely different vision of the present, one that is not circumscribed by historical narratives around race?” Her inquiry continued, “What if the abundant humanity of every individual is a given, honored without qualification or preconception?”
Thus, the invitation is to meet each person eye to eye, which is not the same as viewing them. Look them square or dead in the eyes and allow them to stare back at you.
These are not traditional portraits. They are everyday people, unrestrained and often without context clues. But they’re all dignified, all bearing witness to somatic sovereignty.
See She had an inside and an outside now, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018), named for a passage in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. See What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American).
See Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography all your own, named after a line in Lucille Clifton’s poem “what the mirror said.”
But also, did you see Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, a painting of the former First Lady of the United States? Or Breonna Taylor, the painting commissioned by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published on the cover of Vanity Fair in September 2020? And you cannot leave without seeing Trans Forming Liberty, which reimagined performance artist Arewà Basit as the Statue of Liberty?
Just as Sherald envisioned, they all have their own imagined stories and real sitters. A self-described “conceptual portraitist,” she offers timely and complex artistry that mirrors back to us while questioning what we really see.
“Exhibitions of African American art in American art museums have been curated through two guiding methodologies: the anthropological approach, which displays the difference of racial Blackness from the elevated White ‘norm,’ and the corrective narrative, which aims to present the work of significant and overlooked African American artists to a mainstream audience,” Bridget R. Cooks explained in Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. She continued, “The former methodology reflects an institutional curiosity concerning the presence of racial otherness, commonly coupled with the desire to perpetuate the superiority of mainstream White culture through its contrast to a Black difference defined as inherently inferior. The latter methodology was formed out of the necessity to present the art of African Americans and correct for its historical absence and misrepresentation in mainstream art museums.”
With history-making artistry, as Sherald is the first African American to win the grand prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), Amy Sherald: American Sublime offers the latter. Situating herself in the tradition of American Realism, she said, “I look at America’s heart—peoples, landscapes, and cityscapes—and I see it as an opportunity to add to an American art narrative that was written by painters who were mostly white and male.” She noted, “The stories of American Realism recognize how America found its identity in its art.”
Still, her subjects are not repositioned to adjust to white-body supremacy, but take their normal and rightful position. They do not stand as corrective lenses. Their eyes do not ask, “Do you see me?”
Instead, it is obvious that they are here. Old souls, some may have been here before.
It’s all in the eyes. Because no meaning can be contrived from the social-coloring of skin. Sherald’s use of a grayscale palette calls race/ism into question and paints the possibility of racial eliminativism. And she uses our eyes to do it.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
