Right now, more Black faces grace gallery walls and adorn display pedestals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art than at any time in the museum’s 56-year history.
Within a light-blue field, Sherald depicts the former first lady as a paragon of focused elegance. Her skin is gray, as in a black-and-white photograph, the artist’s frequent strategy for asking viewers of a painting to look beyond superficial assumptions about race. A spectator gazes at an installation of “The Obama Portraits Tour” inside the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during a press preview Wednesday. The show opens to the general public Sunday and runs through Jan. 2, 2022. From left is Kehinde Wiley’s “Barack Obama,” 2018, and Amy Sherald’s “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,” 2018.
A second, even more noteworthy feature of Wiley’s composition is Obama’s seated pose. He leans forward attentively in a wooden parlor chair, elaborately carved., begun before the Civil War victor’s assassination but not finished until much later. Healy worked as tensions around Reconstruction rose and Congress passed the
His shrewd response to Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 “The Blue Boy,” the museum’s famous signature painting, is to recast the scene with an unidentified young Black man, decked out in blue basketball shorts, trailing a baseball cap rather than a
Oh wow I thought that Obama portrait in front of the ivy was a joke.
wow