Certainly former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are people who are “admired and idealized for their courage and outstanding achievements”. Combined with their many other noteworthy attributes, the mantle of hero fits both husband and wife comfortably.
Well understanding the significance of their historic achievements, the couple takes every opportunity to advance the fact that they represent the possible. That message still carries powerful resonance five years after President and Mrs. Obama left the White House and continues to flow vigorously through people’s consciousness. The force of their impact on our psyches may explain why the exhibition, The Obama Portraits, in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, was thronged one early August afternoon. Unsurprisingly, the color spectrum of visitors filling the gallery was wide with Black Americans very much in the minority during that afternoon’s viewing. Age ranges were also impressively broad. It was the tone of the crowd that was so unexpected. An honorific quiet filled the rooms leading to the portraits, leaving you with the feeling that everyone came to witness something momentous.
On loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the portraits are on a five-city tour that ends in Houston next Spring. With only a two-month residency in each city, they will be leaving the Art Institute on August 15th. Unlike in the National Portrait Gallery where they are displayed in two different areas of the museum, here they’re together and wait for you at the end of a winding path of context. Reiterating their stories and connection to Chicago along a time line with graphical representations of places and events, you retrace a journey that eventually leads to the Executive Office and global renown.
Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, the artists who created the portraits are also given a voice and the opportunity to talk about what they wanted to achieve while creating their life size paintings. Their comments, particularly those of Mr. Wiley, are one of the key sources for understanding the symbolism that’s woven into the portraits. Through them we learn how the verdant field of green surrounding Mr. Obama’s image represents the promise and, more importantly, the hope his Presidency symbolized.
For Mrs. Obama, Sherald takes a larger approach that reaches beyond symbolism. Classically contemplative, dignified and in complete accord with the timbre and seriousness of a state portrait, Mrs. Obama’s natural skin color is replaced with an enigmatically cool tone of gray. When asked about her paintings, Sherald usual response is that she “paints pictures of Americans” and that her paintings are intended to tell American stories. Often they are of people from her own community, Black Americans who go about their lives in productive obscurity and are only truly visible to others in their sphere. Sherald routinely uses gray tones in lieu of black and brown skin shades for several reasons, both personal and psychological. One of them includes “relieving her subjects from the internal and external limits imposed by the construct of race.” The technique seems subliminal in its subtlety and quietly fills her image with an air of appealing mystery.
As works of art, both portraits are intriguing in the way they pay homage to and deviate from conventional portraiture. With its lush background and the rich almost golden tones used in the President’s complexion, the image of the United States first bi-racial President is both vibrant and earnest. The First Lady’s portrait is one of serenity presented within a frame of chic modernity.
Much like the Obama portraits, another exhibition featuring contemporary portraits has also been drawing record crowds since it opened in November of 2019. Due to the pandemic, Bisa Butler: Portraits was first extended until April of this year and has been extended again until September 6th. Stunningly beautiful, it’s unfortunate this glorious show can’t be on permanent display.
After reveling in the exceptional visual appeal of both the Obama portraits and all 22 of Butler’s works that fill four galleries of the museum, it’s the eyes that stand out most in each. Butler’s portraits share an inspiration from many of those completed by Amy Sherald. They’re both interested in depicting humanity in and for people who have been denied it. Butler’s interest in re-imagining how portraiture can function started when she was very young visiting relatives in New Orleans. She’d wander through the pages of her grandmother’s photo albums and become fascinated with images that contradicted how Blacks were depicted in the broader society. The people she saw were well dressed, dignified and exuded positive presence.
A graduate of Howard University’s art program, she does not work in paint and oils but instead creates her brilliantly colored, wonderfully remarkable works in textiles. Frequently working from photographs, and expanding her source material beyond family pictures, Butler delved into the vast database of National Archive to unearth pictures of Black people who were photographed but not given the courtesy of being either named or identified. An act that consciously or unconsciously denied their humanness. Butler takes the same image and makes it resplendent; in a sense restoring the individual’s worth and relevance.
There’s nothing dour or opaque about any of the art showcased in either of these outstanding exhibitions. Radiant and affirming, their only disappointment is that they will both be leaving very soon.
The Obama Portraits
Through August 15
Bisa Butler: Portraits
Through September 6
Art Institute of Chicago
111 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603
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