Amy Sherald at the Whitney: Far More Than Michelle Obama’s Portrait

She’s a talented artist, but she needs to avoid rich, white, liberal groupthink, since it’ll ruin her work.

A merican Sublime is the Whitney’s new survey exhibition of the work of Amy Sherald (b. 1973), who soared into the stratosphere of art-world fame in 2018, thanks to her official portrait of Michelle Obama, but she has so much more to offer. She’s a master of the imaginary, or fantasy, portrait — close-up paintings of people that aren’t entirely portrait likenesses. We can’t say “that’s Grandma,” whom we know and love, or “that’s King Charles,” instantly recognizable, but the portraits still have the look of real people. They’re not generic, like the Gerber Baby. It’s a niche genre that merges fiction and flat art.

Dutch Golden Age artists dabbled in imaginary portraits. We call theirs tronie pictures — “tronie” is an old Dutch word meaning “face” — and they convey, mostly, exaggerated expressions and working-class types and, often, proverbs. Later, Fragonard excelled in fantasy portraits, depicting not ideal beauties or matinée idols but men and women with physical flaws that many of us have. Through dress, pose, or props, these people are types, though larger than life.

Sherald selects models and styles them in costumes and props that suggest a ballpark range of narratives while leaving our own imaginations plenty of space to roam. She paints in bright, intense colors, evoking Technicolor, movies from the 1950s and ’60s, and over-the-top interpretations. She’s a resolute realist. Her paintings are big, with a standard 54-by-43-inch format, but some, like the Obama portrait, are six-footers or larger. This gives them a cinematic look.

I like the exhibition, despite the Whitney’s, and possibly Sherald’s, predictable, rote interpretation infused with false pieties about race. She’s a very good artist whom the curators sell short. This is not unusual in New York museums. They feed their older audiences whatever propaganda the New York Times peddles and give their younger audiences the hateful, dispiriting trash that colleges preach. In this case, the Whitney tells its core audience what it expects and wants to hear.

Sherald’s paintings, mostly three-quarter-length but some full-length figures, display a range of looks. They’re fat, thin, bald, bearded, braided, very young, teens, middle-aged, one or two geezers, male and female, and, since this is Manhattan, a transgendered impersonation of the Statue of Liberty. They’re dressed to compel, often in patterns and bright colors, sometimes holding things like a model sailboat, a rabbit and a hat, a doll, a unicorn hobbyhorse, or a supersized teacup. In A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, a bike stands by a woman’s side. In A God Blessed Land, a man rides a farm tractor. Looks are direct. There’s plenty of eye contact. Expressions are benign, though, not exactly blank, inquiring but only up to a point. They’re ambiguous. Figures are set against mottled backgrounds that are very effective — robin’s-egg blue, lavender, or bubblegum pink — or solid backgrounds in teal, sky blue, and beige.

Her palette for skin — all her subjects are African American, as is Sherald — is more grisaille, shades of gray, than brown tones. This is a strategy, we’re told in the labels and in the catalogue, meant to diminish a viewer’s exclusive focus on race. Rather than grudge-and-grievance art, her subjects are “just being,” the curator, Sarah Roberts, tells us, “not in contention, not racialized, but simply living lives of richness, rightness, and greatness in their ordinariness.”

Sherald grew up in Columbus, Ga., and studied art at Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, and, for graduate school, at the great Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. I know her as a Baltimore artist, but she has moved to what we’re told is “the New York area,” which might not serve her art well. She sees herself as working in the American realist modes of Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, Eakins, Ben Shahn, Grant Wood, Isabel Bishop, and Barkley Hendricks, all, except for Shahn, a same old, same old artist, wonderful models, and I’d add Walt Kuhn.

She’s a very American artist and proud of it. Subjects are frankly conveyed, sturdy as trees rather than languid or liquid. Though lacking in European swagger or sprezzatura, they’ve got American pizzazz and quirky American attitude. In Kingdom, from 2022, a child stands on top of a ladder leading to a slide. In The Girl Next Door, from 2019, a very portly woman wears a billowing white summer dress with big polka dots. They look free and fresh.

Let’s dispose of the portrait of Michelle Obama, not because she’s profoundly unlikable but because it’s so famous, having toured the country along with Kehinde Wiley’s companion portrait of President Obama. “For the first time in my adult life, I’m really proud of my country,” Mrs. Obama said when voters decided she could move into the White House. Really? Of her Princeton senior thesis, Christopher Hitchens, who read it, said, “It’s not written in any known language.” She’s a bore, high-maintenance, highly entitled, and a whiner.

Sherald’s other straightforward portrait in the Whitney show depicts Breonna Taylor, whose death, we’re told, “highlights the disproportionate levels of police violence enacted against black Americans.” The picture, Sherald says, “honors all the lives we lost — black women — to police brutality.” The bourgeois socialist glamour and lifestyle magazine Vanity Fair commissioned the Breonna Taylor portrait for its September 2020 cover. That had to be peak season for race pimps, coming as it did after the BLM riots and before the 2020 election. Taylor’s killing itself has to be, factually, the most convoluted death of that most overwrought year. Picking her for an icon doesn’t work.

No matter, it’s the art that counts. The Michelle Obama portrait is very good. Sherald said that lushly geometric quilts made by women in Gee’s Bend, in rural Alabama, inspired her to focus on this particular designer dress. When I first saw the portrait, I thought of a billboard, not for any fault in it but for Sherald’s smart grasp of Mrs. Obama as a symbol. She’s vaguely contemporary, but, flat and blank, she’s a vessel that viewers fill with whatever they’re seeking. She could be an icon of high style, of overcoming adversity, of cool, of nonchalance, of “brat” attitude, of a new American royalty, or of street smarts. I like art that’s open to multiple interpretations. The Taylor portrait, though, is weak tea. Flank it on each side with portraits by, say, John Singer Sargent or Wiley, or by Sherald’s idols Eakins or Neel or Hendricks, and the Taylor picture would fade into the vapors.

American Sublime is a career survey with art from 2007 to last year. Sherald embraced her standard format — a single figure, brightly adorned, looking directly at the viewer — around 2009, in They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake. The term “redbone” refers to light-skinned black people and can be pejorative or sweet, depending on the context. Strawberry Shortcake is a cartoon character whose friends include Huckleberry Pie, Blueberry Muffin, and Plum Puddin’. Society see much difference in skin color, Sherald suggests in her title of an endearing picture of a subject who’s still half-child, half-woman.

I first learned about Sherald when I saw Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) in 2016 at the National Portrait Gallery’s always first-rate Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. She won first prize for her depiction of a young woman dressed in a casual cheeky style and holding a teacup, wearing white gloves and a sassy hat. It evokes Alice in Wonderland. Sherald once called herself an escape artist, meaning not so much escape from the miseries of a racist country upon which the show’s catalogue too often dwells, but escape as the human yen to fantasize.

I like thinking of her as a new magic realist. That’s a movement, mostly in literature, in which a story rooted in the mundane world takes a supernatural, or at least fantastic, turn. Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, and John Banville are modern examples among novelists, but, among American artists, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker seem best as Sherald’s ancestors.

Sherald developed fast. The Bathers, from 2015, depicts two women in swimsuits, holding hands. Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between, from 2018, another double-figure picture, shows two women, one looking at us, one with her back turned to us, with a rocket launching in the distance. The figures are barefoot and stand in a golden, grassy landscape. “We’re flying to the moon,” one figure seems to ask. Are we coming along for the ride? It’s less playful and more serious. As Soft as She Is, from 2022, is powerful and a far better picture than Breonna Taylor. Sherald’s various, with lots of looks and takes up her sleeve.

Pictures such as Trans Forming Liberty, from 2024, probably don’t do Sherald any good, reputation-wise or in her growth as an artist. A figure looking like the Statue of Liberty stands sassy and resolute, wearing a blue satin gown with oversized blue ribbons, an electric pink bob, and a chorus-girl-worthy slit skirt. The figure is meant to embrace liberty — of the huddled-masses-yearning-to-be-free variety — for gay, “nonbinary,” and transgendered people, as if any of them have a common agenda.

It’s lazy image-making, easy and trite, and middlebrow art suitable for the faculty lounge of a Gender Studies Department. Innocent You, Innocent Me, from 2016, situates, we’re told, the death of apprentice thug Trayvon Martin in the context of racial profiling, but that’s been debunked. It’s a modern myth, which inadvertently suggests, and this is a curatorial flub, that Sherald’s work is, over time, inelastic and one-dimensional. Is it poetic and enigmatic, or is it just newsy?

While Trans Forming Liberty, putting blackness in an American icon, is schlock, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, from 2019, works beautifully. The painting, which belongs to the Whitney, quotes the well-known 1932 photograph of a group of steelworkers lunching on girders high in the sky on the under-construction of the Chrysler Building. In Sherald’s take, a black man takes the spot as symbol of labor, industry, ambition, and fearlessness. It’s effective and gorgeous.

“I hate feeling like to have to feed into a certain brand of blackness the art world promotes. . . . I’m anti-that,” Sherald said in a 2012 interview, and I believe her. Goodness, as a young woman, she studied art in Norway for a year, in part, I suspect, to flee from the expectations of art critics, academia, and the marketplace.

Yes, her earliest picture in the Whitney show, Hangman, from 2007, is a lynching scene, but Sherald quickly fled from topics so incendiary, instead embracing inspirations such as the circus, Teletubbies, ’50s-movie style, saturated Caribbean color, and young people trying different looks.

Four Ways of Being is a billboard with images selected by Sherald and installed across the street from the Whitney. It’s really the four ages of man, with four images of men in her standard, vertical format, one a teen in a splashy but goofy sweater, one a dapper young man with a New Age hairdo, one a middle-aged man looking good for his age, and one an old man wearing a snappy hat and a tie with butterflies.

Sherald’s content gets bigger and bigger, so we know she’s growing, as all good artists do. She’s a natural colorist. In A Golden Afternoon, from 2016, the subject, a sporty, thirtysomething man, wears layers of color — a mustard jacket, a blue dress shirt, and a lime-green polo shirt underneath. His enigmatic look and solid yet casual posture tell us that he knows how to keep a cool distance, as do all of Sherald’s figures. His palette gives him bounce. The exhibition and the book do her a disservice in not exploring her technique.

American Sublime is an inapt title. The “sublime,” as opposed to the “beautiful,” are art and literary history terms describing aspects of Romanticism, with “sublime” characterizing grandeur, awe, overwhelming power, or immensity, and “beauty” suggesting pleasure and harmony. In American art, Frederic Church’s icebergs, jungles, and volcanos are sublime. John Kensett’s or Sanford Gifford’s serene seascapes and pastures are beautiful. Sherald’s work isn’t relevant to either.

The show’s title must come from a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, about the absence of slavery from Hudson River School landscape painting. Alexander is all race, all the time, and since she sits on billions, she gets more airtime than, as a poet, she deserves. Most Hudson River School art is set in New York and New England — no slaves — and it’s both landscapes and seascapes, a swath of which were done after the Civil War. Surely a more precise and less bewildering title could have been found. I would have ditched Alexander’s short, useless catalogue essay for a piece on Sherald’s colors.

In 2012, Sherald had a heart transplant caused by what was likely a birth defect. She doesn’t dwell on it, but it’s there. She sees her life as a miracle, and this explains, in part, why she isn’t from the 1619 Project school of fake history and axe-grinding. Her work’s coy, sweet, snazzy, buff, plucky, bold, and tender. Using black subjects to convey her looks or moods isn’t entirely new, but Sherald does it with unerring warmth. Her pictures are refreshing, not depressing. Living near New York, she might become a captive of wrongthink and, being a John Waters fan, see idiosyncratic Baltimore as a more effective spur to creativity. That said, Sherald, having gone through a heart transplant, must be tough. I’m looking forward to her next wave of work.