The ART of REFUSAL

DEREK C. BLASBERG talks to artist AMY SHERALD about how her blockbuster exhibition, "AMERICAN SUBLIME," landed at the BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART and why INTEGRITY still MATTERS-in ART and in LIFE

- 

I’ve heard Amy Sherald tell this story before, but it’s so good, I’m asking her to tell it again.

“I was painting, and the phone rang,” the Columbus, Georgia-born painter, who was living and working in Baltimore at the time, begins. It was 2017, and destiny was on the line: Her name was Dorothy Moss, and she was then the curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. “‘You should sit down,’ Moss said.” Sherald did as she was told. “‘Michelle chose you to paint her portrait.’”

At the age of 44, Sherald, a relatively under-the-radar Black portraitist whose style is defined by grayscale skin tones and brightly colored, minimalist backgrounds, had been selected to paint the official portrait of the first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. She remembers getting the news while she was working in her space at the Creative Alliance, a local residency program that offers below-market rent on live-work studios; she remembers her IKEA sofa. “I was sitting with my dog August Wilson. He’s a Virgo, like his mom,” Sherald recalls. “I told him, ‘Your mom is going to be famous. You’ll never have to eat cheap dog food again!’”

With that call, Sherald’s name entered a different pantheon—not just in the world of contemporary art but in the national conversation around self-expression, identity, representation, and Black subjectivity. Her work is now in the collections of top museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and commands considerable attention (and prices to match) on the art market.

All of that made Sherald’s decision to cancel a survey of her work that was set to open at the National Portrait Gallery this past fall that much more emblematic of just how drastically the cultural climate in the country has changed.