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.
Maybe more than in all those years combined, but surely at least as many in a single show since 1976, when LACMA celebrated the nation’s bicentennial with the landmark “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950.”
The stars are Barack and Michelle Obama, whose portraits were commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and unveiled to a warm critical reception in February 2018. Now embarked on a national tour to five cities, the paintings — respectively by Kehinde Wiley, 44, and Amy Sherald, 48 — open to the public in L.A. on Sunday. They occupy one wall of a large room, the empty space an indicator of an expectation for sizable crowds of eager viewers.
To give the two pictures some context, LACMA has also pulled together “Black American Portraits,” an exhibition in an adjacent gallery of 140 works by 110 artists, most but not all of them Black. Two-thirds are museum acquisitions and promised gifts, many recent, with the rest on loan from galleries and private collections. They’re hung salon-style, which yields a lively sense of visual conversation among disparate artists.
The Obama paintings, each figure shown seated and depicted roughly life-size, are stylistically different from each other, although both italicize aspects of the sitter’s personality.
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.
Dressed in a long but unstuffy white evening gown, the geometric decorations on its billowing skirt a nod to designs in Modern art, African American quilts and current fashion, she rests her right elbow on her other forearm, draped over a crossed knee. Michelle Obama’s right hand languidly grazes beneath her chin, dangling blue fingernails that add a distinctive note of contemporary color.
The pose is at once self-protective, her body shielded, and exquisitely self-contained. The word that comes to mind is fierce. That admirable attitude is bold, unapologetic and intensely present — a perfect fit for the subject.
