On April 1st, I visited the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History to visit their Brown Gallery. From February to the end of this month, the gallery’s exhibit is “The Magical Real-ism of Amy Sherald.” Before visiting the gallery, I had read a brief synopsis of the exhibit on the Stone Center’s website. I knew that Sherald painted her figures’ skin tones in shades of gray to remove color from their characteristics, but I did not know much else about the exhibit—other than knowledge of magical realism from my Spanish classes. And when I visited the gallery I chose not to read the pamphlet about the exhibit until after I explored it myself so that I could compare my analysis and emotions to that of the curator and the artist.
All of Sherald’s paintings in the gallery are portraits—all with one subject with the exception of one painting. My first impression of her paintings was her beautiful use of color. Despite the gray-ish skins tones (some of which lent themselves more to brown than I thought they would), the clothing that her subjects wore often included beautiful bright colors. In addition, her backgrounds used color amazingly well; they looked kind of splotchy throughout with shimmering details in beautiful hues. The backgrounds were probably the parts of the paintings I was most interested in terms of art technique. My brother is an abstract painter and Sherald’s background techniques reminded me of parts of his work.
As I went through the gallery reading the titles of the paintings and looking into the eyes of Sherald’s subjects, of whom two of the women she painted you could not see their eyes, I began to get a kind of circus feeling from the exhibit. There were two paintings of women that included bars in their backgrounds that solidified this circus-feeling to me. This was especially true for the piece entitled “Maybe if I wore a Mask,” where a woman in a corseted dress is wearing a tiger masking and reaching for a bar. Pieces like this one made me ponder the relationship between the titles and the paintings—many were ironic and I sensed a deeper meaning than their surface value.
I loved the clothing in each of the portraits, but my favorite painting, “Puppet Master,” was not because of the clothes the subject wore, but rather the puppet he held. In his hands was a large whale puppet—not the first animal that comes to mind when one thinks of hand puppets. I connected with this piece because of the whale puppet. When I was really young I had a tiny whale stuffed animal that I could stick my thumb into his mouth and use him like a puppet. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and swimming in my aunt’s pool in Massachusetts with my tiny whale stuck to my thumb—adventuring with my playmate. This painting recalled all of these memories to me.
After I left the gallery, I sat down by the big glass windows at the Stone Center and read the informational pamphlet about the exhibit. Interestingly enough, the curator mentions the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of whom I’ve read many of his works and used this knowledge in my interpretation of the title of Sherald’s exhibit. The circus theme was also mentioned, so the evocation of that theme was a success. The curator wrote one phrase that really stuck with in regard to the exhibit: “Sherald takes pleasure in demonstrating her skills as a realist painter. That said, she uses realist painting to question reality in painting.” This felt very true and described the paintings along with their ironic titles.
Also from the pamphlet, it was interesting to read Sherald’s biography and learn more about her treatment of race in her paintings—discarding skin tone yet include facial characteristics that make the ethnicity of her subjects clear. Her work is autobiographical in some ways, as is clear in the painting of the exhibit entitled “They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake,” which shows a young girl of African, European and Native American descent and brings up the question of lighter vs. darker skin. Beyond this, Sherald’s work manifests into a commentary on “social context with a satirical twist,” which illuminates her title selections. A good example of this is her painting of two men in beautiful white and blue suits who look to be of African descent holding two light pink cotton candy sticks entitled “We Ain’t No Cotton Picking Negroes.”
Take a look for yourself before April 22.
