Diana Beasley knew she wanted to spend her 12th birthday at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, surrounded by the paintings of Amy Sherald.
She dressed up for the occasion, wearing a sparkly pink crown reading “BIRTHDAY GIRL” over her neat braids. Diana learned about Sherald in school, she said, and she likes how her art is “realistic, but also a bit cartoony at the same time.”
Her favorite piece by Sherald, she said, was the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. In it, as in most of Sherald’s portraits, the subject looks straight ahead at the viewer. Her skin is not a naturalistic brown but rendered in grays, in the artist’s signature style, draped in a vivid black and white dress with multicolored geometric details and a soft baby blue background. Obama looks determined, Diana said, like “she’s serious about her job.”
The Michelle Obama portrait is part of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime," which is now in Atlanta. Matthew Millman/Courtesy the artist/SFMOMA
That Michelle Obama portrait, presented in front of two benches for attendees to sit and take in her gaze, is one of the main draws of the “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” exhibit, which arrived in Atlanta this month for the final stage of a 17-month national tour. When the painting was unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2018 — in tandem with Kehinde Wiley’s presidential portrait of Barack Obama — it seemed to mark Sherald’s enshrinement in a new official establishment, one in which Black figures and Black perspectives were uncontroversially part of the canon.
