Something Borrowed

The painting, on loan to NMWA through September, is Well Prepared and Maladjusted (2008), by Amy Sherald (b. 1973). Sherald considers it a pivotal work in her career, and it began with a chance encounter. When Sherald met her subject, the artist was working in Baltimore, and the model was a curatorial intern at the city’s Walters Art Museum. Drawn to her height, hairstyle, and overall look, Sherald chose to depict the woman in the outfit she was wearing that day. According to Sherald, “She was 6’3” and had on this polka-dot outfit from a second-hand store . . . I saw my story in her.” While Sherald painted, a poet wrote about her work as part of a program through the Studio Museum in Harlem. Once they were both done, Sherald found the perfect title for the painting from the poem’s lines.

While at NMWA, Well Prepared and Maladjusted joins Sherald’s They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake (2009), a 2012 acquisition currently on view in the museum’s collection galleries. Would it surprise you to know both artworks were inspired by the same woman?

The paintings began with color photographs taken by Sherald, who documented the model in various costumes. When translating the image to painting, the artist included two of her hallmark techniques: she painted the skin in shades of gray, and she removed the background, which focuses viewers’ attention on the figure by eliminating references to time and space. Sherald is often asked, “why gray?,” and she acknowledges that her answer to the question has transformed over the years. In part, it is a reflection on the history of photography. For Sherald, the invention of the camera and the accessibility of black-and-white photography represent a turning point: Black people could create their own images and control their stories widely for the first time.

Well Prepared and Maladjusted shares key qualities with Sherald’s more recent work, but her artistic evolution is clear in subtle shifts, such as a move away from the textured backgrounds seen here toward flatter planes of color. Still, the core of her work remains the same. Sherald has said, “My mission as an artist really hasn’t changed, to put more complex stories of Black life in the forefront of people’s minds and on the walls of museums. I think that’s what I want to continue to do . . . take up space and reclaim time.”

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Just a mile away from their home at NMWA, 11 collection works are on display on the walls of the National Gallery. This collaboration enables the art in both collections to be understood and experienced in a fresh context.

Modern Visions

In addition to our old mistresses, the National Gallery is also hosting select NMWA works by artists from the 20th century to the present. Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery, says, “These generous loans have allowed us to supplement our East Building permanent collection galleries with…an iconic self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, a minimalist relief by Eva Hesse, and a sensitive figure painting by Amy Sherald. [These works fill] specific gaps in our collection while allowing us to better represent the key contributions of women to the history of modern and contemporary art.”

Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937) shows the artist framed between drawn curtains as if presenting herself to her intended viewer—the Russian exiled revolutionary, with whom she had a brief affair. Adorned in flowers, jewelry, and traditional attire, Kahlo (1907–1954) imbues her image with elegance and self-assurance. The painting not only makes references to Kahlo’s cultural heritage through her preference for Tehuana dresses, but also demonstrates her Marxist political inclinations via her association with Trotsky.

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Known for her pioneering sculptural work in fiberglass, latex, and plastics, Hesse (1936–1970) explored the ways in which simple materials could suggest a wide range of experiences and states of mind. She often employed grids in her work, as seen in Study for Sculpture (1967), in which tightly knotted cords dangle in nine-by-nine rows and columns from a Masonite surface. The industrial, artificial qualities of metal and varnish contrast with the organic, corporeal feel of pliant materials that protrude and hang limply into sexually ambiguous forms, expressing balance and unity through opposites.

The use of gray for Amy Sherald, as with Hesse, plays a critical role in her art. While Hesse explored geometric forms and the effects of light, Sherald (b. 1973) uses mono-chromatic elements to deconstruct social codes about race. They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake (2009) depicts a young girl in the artist’s signature grayscale. The artist’s works are often grounded in self-reflective perspectives, as she herself experienced being labeled the term “redbone,” slang for a biracial or light-skinned person of African descent. Through the absence of skin tones associated with Black identity, she challenges common perceptions of racial markers, instead choosing to represent Blackness through her own unique lens. The figure of the young girl in the lemon yellow dress almost appears to float in space against the bright pink background, seemingly unconfined by societal and cultural borders.

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I contacted Sherald the next day and scheduled a visit to her basement studio on Baltimore’s Howard Street. It was then that I purchased my first painting by her, They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake (2009). I called Kathryn Wat, chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), and excitedly told her about my new acquisition. She planned a studio visit with the artist the next month and had a similar reaction, calling Sherald a “true original.” In 2012, I donated the painting to NMWA in honor of the artist and the 25th anniversary of the museum, which I have cherished since its inception. Soon after, I purchased It Made Sense…Mostly In Her Mind (2011), a portrait of Black woman dressed as a high society polo player holding a unicorn hobby horse. I lent it to NMWA, where it was on view with They Call Me Redbone…, alongside NMWA’s famed Frida Kahlo self-portrait, for many years.

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It has been a true pleasure to watch Sherald’s career take off over the past few years. In 2016, curators at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) saw her work at NMWA and later awarded her first prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait followed in 2017, when the First Lady chose the artist to paint her portrait for the NPG collection. In 2018, leading international gallery Hauser & Wirth announced exclusive representation of Sherald; her premiere show at the gallery in 2019 opened with long lines around the block. Record-breaking auction prices have followed—from $350,000 for Innocent You, Innocent Me (2016) at Christie’s in 2019 to $4.2 million for The Bathers (2015) at Phillips in December 2020. In September 2020, her profoundly evocative posthumous portrait of Breonna Taylor was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair to great fanfare. The painting was subsequently acquired in March 2021 jointly by the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

With glowing reviews in the international art press and mainstream press, including the New York Times, and with a long waiting list of museum clients and collectors, Sherald is an international sensation—the superstar she deserves to be. Her glorious portrait of Michelle Obama will travel for the next few years across America, along with Kehinde Wiley’s stunning portrait of Barack Obama, for a national museum tour that will allow hundreds of thousands of visitors to see Sherald’s greatness for themselves. I hope they have an experience similar to mine—of being in the presence of true brilliance.

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Throughout Western art history, women artists have distinguished themselves by persistently and successfully working within a system that has tried to suppress them and/or devalue their efforts. Not to be dismissed, they charted their own courses, petitioned for admittance to all-male art schools and artists’ organizations, and developed their own networks.

Beginning in the 20th century, many women artists boldly engaged with social issues and embraced their roles as advocates. These visionaries demonstrate that revolution comes in many forms, and their voices are alternately gracious, shrewd, fierce, and funny. In our “Rebels with a Cause” gallery, these artists—and often the individuals they portray—demonstrate that women have blazed trails and propelled change for centuries.

Gallery Highlights:

Born in 1552, Italian Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) is regarded as the first professional woman artist in Western Europe. Not only did she work within the same sphere as her male counterparts, but her husband gave up his artistic ambitions to manage her career and their household. Through eleven pregnancies, Fontana produced vibrant, detailed works, and eventually became a portraitist at the courts of several popes in Rome.

What If Women Ruled the World (2016), the six-foot neon sculpture by Yael Bartana (b. 1970), raises questions around gender equity, national identity, and the fate of humanity. The piece is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which a select group of powerful white men assemble to discuss options for survival in the face of an accidental nuclear Armageddon. Bartana’s piece proposes and proclaims a more peaceful alternative to this vision.

Amy Sherald (b. 1973) reworks the traditional portrait format to reimagine the African American experience and challenge concepts of racial identity. Sherald’s haunting figures are expressionless and dressed in playful, costume-style clothing. In all of her works, including our painting They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather be Strawberry Shortcake (2009), Sherald paints her subjects in grayscale, metaphorically removing their skin color and helping viewers imagine a world without restrictive stereotypes.

No discussion of “Rebels with a Cause” would be complete without the Guerrilla Girls, a group of famous—but anonymous—activist-artists who began wearing gorilla masks to call out sexism and racism in the art world of the 1980s. Several of their broadsides are on view at NMWA, including the well-known poster Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? (2005). Fortunately, as this and other works in this new themed gallery illustrate, women artists have found other ways to get their work noticed and their talent and ideas across.

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The New York Botanical Garden planted a “Hawai’ian Paradise Garden” as part of the exhibition chronicling O’Keeffe’s 1939 trip to Hawaii to create art for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company.

Front-Page Femmes

Of the top 100 artists whose works sold for the highest amounts at auction in 2017, only 13 were women. Yayoi Kusama was the only living woman artist in the top 50 artists.

The J. Paul Getty Museum acquired two French bronzes: Camille Claudel’s Torso of a Crouching Woman and Auguste Rodin’s Bust of John the Baptist.

Sherrie Silver, the choreographer behind Childish Gambino’s dance in “This is America,” says her goal is to “take Afro dance and Afro culture to the world and then take the world to Africa.”

“Films directed by women constituted only 3% of all the screenings that occurred around the world,” writes the Guardian.

Barbara Kasten reflects on the significance of her 1970s cyanotypes in an art21 video profile.

Journalist Masih Alinejad discusses her new memoir and her campaign against a law requiring that Iranian women and girls to cover their heads and necks with a hijab.

PAPER Magazine explores Lorna Simpson’s enduring influence and her work exploring the intersection of race and gender identity.
Mimi Cherono Ng’ok describes her best photograph.

Artsy delves into the history of women photographers in Victorian England.

The search for Frida Kahlo’s long-lost painting La Mesa Herida (The Wounded Table) has been revived in Mexico.

Taryn Simon’s new performance and installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca) will involve plunging museum visitors into icy water.

The Brooklyn Museum recently acquired 96 works by women in conjunction with its program A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism.

National Geographic spotlights several women artists’ self-portraits and how their works sparked meaningful dialogue.

Shows We Want to See

Amy Sherald’s solo show at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is on view through August 19. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Sherald reflects on her work and says, “…it’s nice to come into a space and see yourself expressed gently and just being able to sit with that.”

Carissa Rodriguez: The Maid presents two video works and a series of photo-based works, on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Massachusetts.

Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec will feature more than 50 paintings. The exhibition includes a painting by Morisot from NMWA’s collection.

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The little girl’s mother told CNN, “As a female and as a girl of color, it’s really important that I show her people who look like her that are doing amazing things and are making history so that she knows she can do it.”

This statement echoed the former first lady’s remarks at the painting’s unveiling, “[Girls, and especially girls of color,] will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the walls of this great American institution. And I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives because I was one of those girls.”

It is extremely exciting for me to see the public interact with Sherald’s work in person and on social media. While the painting of Obama evoked a mixed reception from some who were unfamiliar with her stylized practice, it won high praise from many for its insightful take on a strong woman, inspiring people of all ages. In 2012—before Sherald’s name was widely known—the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) took notice of her work. You can see two paintings, They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake and It Made Sense…Mostly In Her Mind, in our galleries.

Our Chief Curator Kathryn Wat says, “Sherald’s flamboyant palette and the gray-scale skin tones of her figures are part of what makes her work so engaging. The way she positions figures in her portraits—usually aimed straight forward and looking out with a neutral expression—is also arresting. I think she rejects the romantic idea that portraits ought to capture not just a likeness but the essence of a sitter’s character. Her work offers a much livelier take on portraiture—it suggests that people are never of a singular personality and much more complex than we might ever imagine.” Sherald explained that the way she portrays skin color is “a way of deconstructing race and asking that question about what race means to us as a people.”

In the wake of the Obama portrait’s unveiling, Sherald’s work is receiving widespread attention. She was recently awarded the 2018 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which is presented to a person who has made a significant contribution to the conversation about the work of black artists.

In honor of Women’s History Month, our museum hung a banner featuring Sherald and the word “inspire” on the building. When a woman artist deserves praise, we don’t hesitate to shout it out.

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How did you first develop your signature backgrounds?

“I was trying to work my way through some ideas, and I actually tried to destroy a painting. I poured turpentine all over it and I just left it on the floor. I came back the next day and there were parts of it that had this speckling effect that I really liked. It’s important that these figures don’t exist in a space or time. I feel like the backgrounds work for that—they exist in a liminal space.”

Can you talk about the way you portray skin color?

“In graduate school I was creating self-portraits. . . . I painted people in different colors. One was black, one was a raw sienna, and one was a yellow ochre. It was a way of deconstructing race and asking that question about what race means to us as a people. The gray was an under color and I decided to leave it. Mars black and Naples yellow make these beautiful skin tones. . . . Each [figure] is a different color because each background is a different color. Green comes through, blue comes through, pink comes through. It just worked.”

What was it like studying with Grace Hartigan?

“She was a great role model—especially the stories she would tell about what her life was like as a woman trying to be an artist, working with [Jackson] Pollock and [Willem] de Kooning, and the tension that was there…the way they would put her down sometimes. All those things were learning experiences.

Would you ever consider making smaller works?

“I really love drawing with charcoal…so, yes, I have. But then when I think about the work being in a museum. For me, the bigger the better because I want to take up that space and…I don’t want anyone visiting the museum and wondering if there was an Amy Sherald in there. I want them to know it was an Amy Sherald.”

Visit the museum to see Sherald’s paintings in person. Stay tuned about future programs through the online calendar and by signing up for e-news.

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They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake (2009) relates to Sherald’s life in Columbus, Georgia. “Once I moved to Baltimore I realized no one called me a ‘redbone,’” explained Sherald. “If you don’t know what a ‘redbone’ is…it refers to someone who is supposed to be of Native American, African, and European descent. So, in the South it was very race conscious. . . . My basketball coach called me ‘redbone,’ which I really didn’t mind. And then there were other people who I didn’t know who called me ‘redbone’…and I didn’t like it so much.”

Sherald explained her personal connection to the subject of It Made Sense…Mostly in Her Mind (2011), portraying a horseback rider holding a children’s toy unicorn. “I went to an equestrian riding camp when I was an adolescent,” said Sherald, who later developed the idea for the painting after seeing her friend’s mother do dressage. Sherald asked her friend, Christina, to model for the painting because she embodied the sophistication Sherald wanted to capture.

Both paintings are displayed on the same gallery wall as Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937). “Frida Kahlo was one of my inspirations,” said Sherald. “When I changed my major from pre-med to painting, I had these ideas of painting a lot of the same things she did. I was talking to my art teacher Arturo Lindsay and he said, ‘look up Frida Kahlo.’” Sherald added, “I’m honored, to say the least.”

When discussing the impact of her paintings, Sherald told attendees, “I received emails from all kinds of people that see themselves in this work, and that’s really important too.” Sherald noted, “When you walk through a space like [the museum] you don’t always see this [gesturing to the figures in her paintings]. For me, this became really important, interjecting images of the underrepresented in the dominant circle narrative and making work that I felt would resonate in a way that art history can’t be told without it. . . . I consider myself an American Realist, maybe with a post-modern flare.”

Visit the museum to see Sherald’s paintings in person. Stay tuned about future programs through the online calendar and by signing up for e-news.

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1. Figure It Out

Sherald’s fascination with portraiture began at a young age when she explored art history through encyclopedias. Enthralled by the illustrations, she came to the conclusion that a great artist has the ability to expertly render the human form.

2. Make It Big

Sherald first visited a museum on a sixth grade field trip, and she still remembers the impact of seeing Bo Bartlett’s 10-by-14-foot Object Permanence (1986). This work sparked her desire to create large-scale figurative paintings.

3. Do What You Love

The daughter of a dentist, Sherald entered Clark-Atlanta University as a pre-med student, but her passion for painting was too strong to ignore. She switched majors in the middle of her junior year and began to focus on her art in earnest.

4. Model Behavior

The model featured in They call me Redbone, but I’d rather be Strawberry Shortcake (2009), in NMWA’s collection, also appears in another of work by Sherald, Well Prepared and Maladjusted (2008). According to the artist, “[The model] was tall and different looking, and she had this really awesome Afro bouff.”

5. Herstory

In 2016, Sherald became the first woman to win the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for her work Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013).

Want to meet the artist? Join us on May 9, 2017 for a special Artists in Conversation program featuring Amy Sherald. Reserve your spot online!

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The film borrows its title from the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlawed slavery but left a loophole. NPR calls it the film a “searing, opinionated interpretation of American history.” The Guardian writes that DuVernay leans on “eloquent talking-head interviews and well-sourced archive material” to study the links between slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration.
Front-Page Femmes
Victoria and Albert Museum curator Sonnet Stanfill discusses gender imbalance in art museum leadership. NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling adds that “women still have a long road ahead of them to gain gender parity in the museum world.”
NO MAN’S LAND artist Anicka Yi received the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize for innovative and influential work in the contemporary art world.
2016 MacArthur Fellow Kellie Jones says, “A lot of women artists don’t get any recognition…their early years are really their 50s or 60s.”

NMWA artist Amy Sherald talks to Baltimore Magazine about her education, heart failure, and professional success.
Yoko Ono unveiled her first permanent art installation in the U.S.
Hyperallergic writes, “Decades before other artists, [Florine] Stettheimer depicted a number of challenging subjects that remain controversial and relevant today.”
Artist Nidaa Badwan created a photo series chronicling 20 months she spent in self-imposed quarantine during the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Madame Tussauds in Hong Kong will open a Yayoi Kusama “artistic themed zone.”
British artist Lucy Sparrow created bodies of work that consist of more than 4,000 items made entirely of felt.
Japanese paper artist Chie Hitotsuyama creates textured sculptures of animals using rolled strips of wet newspaper.
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will feature NO MAN’S LAND artist Isa Genzken’s I love Michael Asher.
Photographer Beth Moon documents the world’s oldest trees in her new book Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees.
A new animated biopic offers insight into Hokusai’s work through the life of his daughter, an artist in Edo-era Japan.
Six female artists, including NO MAN’S LAND painter Elizabeth Peyton, discuss Bob Dylan’s influence.
Actress Kathleen Turner discusses The Year of Magical Thinking, a play based on Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir.
Shows We Want to See

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen hosts Louise Bourgeois. The Structure of Existence: The Cells, showcasing 25 of the artist’s powerful installations. Referred to as “cells” by Bourgeois, each work “is an independent spatial unit filled with carefully arranged objects which create different scenarios.”
Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s at The Photographers’ Gallery features the work of 45 female artists from across the world, including Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, and Hannah Wilke.
Grandma Moses: American Modern is on view at the Shelburne Museum. Hyperallergic writes, “The Grandma Moses story reads a lot like an artist’s fairy tale.”

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