The Obama Portraits by the Smithsonian

I have collaborated the deYoung off and on in the past 10 years in supporting the outreach of the museum to educators and children. As a member of many museums in the City, I often find myself as a person of color in predominantly White spaces. And while I do to see the art and the undergirding of the creative endeavors of what hangs on the walls, it is a brown man often looking at art from a dominant White culture. The other people of color are often the Black and Filipino museum guards or the Latino janitors who clean the restrooms. I clearly felt this today as I visited the restroom, as a Latino man was cleaning the sinks in the men’s room. His work is not similar to the work my grandfather and father did as agricultural workers in the fields. And as my parents had, And while he may be grateful to work in such a prestigious institution, he, like my parents, probably has dreams of better opportunities for his children.

I paint American people. And I tell American stories through the paintings I create. I find my models, I style hem, and I photograph them. I then use that photograph as a reference. My approach to the portrait is conceptual. Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in that painting as themselves, I see something bigger, more symbolic. An archetype. So approaching the commission with you as the subject of this painting is deeply connected to what I hold as my truth. This portrait delivers the same kind of symbolism…. (Mrs. Obama) you exist in our minds and our hears in the way that you do because we can see ourselves in you. The act of Michelle Obama becoming her authentic self became a profound statement that engaged all of us. Because of what you represent to this country is an ideal. A human being, with integrity, intellect, confidence, and compassion. And the paintings I create aspire to express these attributes. A message of humanity. And I like to think that they hold the same possibilities of being read universally.

 

--Amy Sherald.

These big museums, like this, are dedicated to what we as a society hold most dear. Great curators, their jobs are to be the guardians of culture, to say this isa what we as a people stand for. Growing up as a kid in South Central Los Angeles going to the museums in LA, there weren’t too many people who happened to look like me on those walls. So, as the years go on and as I try to create my own type of work, it has to do with correcting some of that. Trying to find places where people who look like me do feel accepted or do have the ability to express their state of grace on the grand narrative scale of museum space….This is consequential, this is who we are as a society decide to celebrate. This is our humanity, this is our ability to say: I matter. I was here. The ability to be the first African American painter to paint the first African American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming.

 

--Kehinde Wiley