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Amy Sherald became one of the most celebrated African American artists by painting one of the most celebrated African American women. It does credit to both women, her and Michelle Obama, as stylish and official. Which woman did more to create an image for others to admire?

If a portrait does the job well, it may never be easy to separate the artist from the sitter, the dancer from the dance. I wrote about the now popular painter twice before, on her delivery of the Obama state portrait and again with a fair survey of her work at her gallery. Much as I want to respond to so inviting a show as her midcareer retrospective at the Whitney, through August 10, my second past review really does say it all. Nor is this a black artist’s only display of innocence, sophistication, and sheer pleasure in one and the same portrait. So I also wrap this into past reports on John Dowell and Jordan Casteel, with their own monuments to African American portraiture and history, and invite you to read more. Sherald has refused to allow her own show’s planned second stop, at the National Portrait Gallery, calling the decision to “contextualize” her portrait of Obama in line with Donald J. Trump’s outrageous wishes, as censorship.

People do not often swoon over official state portraits, least of all followers of art. It would be like swooning over someone else’s yearbook photo—or a gold star from the world’s primmest teacher. Yet here they were, portraits of Barak and Michelle Obama making the news. Visits to the National Portrait Gallery soared, and (as you can see from the link) I swooned a bit, too. The portraits arrived just as an awful lot of people were longing for leaders with intelligence and a conscience, rather than just a certain orange president. People longed, too, for voices with authority to speak for them.

Oh, and then there were the artists, Kehinde Wiley for the former president and Sherald for his first lady. Wiley had appeared in galleries and museums before, often at that, for decorative, flattering, and frankly shallow portraits of African Americans off the street, all but exclusively young, aggressive, and male. He takes pride in his subjects, but with little hint that black lives matter and are at risk. Had he finally risen to the occasion, or had the occasion descended to him? Sherald, far less visible at the time, may offer a clue. Her latest portraits, much like Wiley’s in the past, stick to moments of leisure and to friends.

Her mega-gallery also has a group show that thrusts human sexuality at once in your face and behind a veil, with artists including Paul McCarthy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Mira Schor. Sherald does not. She makes desire so childlike that she adapted a famous photo of a kiss in Times Square at the end in World War II. Downstairs comes an older African American, Ed Clark—better known for his place in Abstract Expressionist New York and, quite possibly, the very first shaped canvas. Work since 2000 transforms even the purest of abstraction into glimpses of clouds and sky. For the gallery’s fall 2019 opener and again for a Whitney retrospective in 2025, lavish brushwork looks back to the most gentle and glorious of summer afternoons.

Sherald feels the warmth, too, even as the real air grows cold. Four bathers, the women on the men’s shoulders, enjoy the sand and a near cloudless sky. Who is to say which earns the painting its title, Precious Jewels by the Sea? A young black man sits high in a clear-blue sky, his butt on one girder and his back against another. Sherald took for inspiration a famous shot of workers at lunch, but this guy is neither dressed for work nor short of time. With just eight paintings at her gallery, for once a hot artist ignored the pressure to churn things out, so you could relax, too.

For Sherald, attention to friends does not preclude a leap of imagination. As a self-portrait has it, When I Let Go of What I Am, I Become What I Might Be. Some pretty tart colors share space with that sky blue. She has room for reality all the same, from a handsome young man to the overweight “girl next door.” Like Michelle Obama in her portrait, large central figures stand out against fields of color, almost like playing cards. They also share contrasting paint handling in figures, clothing, and backgrounds—to play degrees of realism against one another and to keep the surfaces alive.

Backgrounds are totally flat, but with wild swings in color from painting to painting. Flesh is well-shadowed, but not in the interest of anatomy or the fall of light. Faces are personalized, but not psychologically, and everything else pops to the surface, like a beach umbrella or a polka dot dress. Titles are poetic but erudite, like the recollection of Jane Austin’s Pride in Prejudice in A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune. The title for the construction worker, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, speaks to him, but also to you. If they still feel too much like pages from the style section of a Sunday paper, consider them official portraits of the girl next door.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Luana Vitra thinks of her work as “devotional offerings.” Is it too late to show her devotion to her African roots, her native Brazil, and the earth? And who is left to receive her offerings—apart from those who already enriched themselves on the former Congo? If Marina Zurkow is right, when it comes to the earth’s material resources, people were past caring long ago—and I work this together with recent reports on trees at Wave Hill as a look at art and climate change and my latest upload.

Signs of recent life appear clearly enough with Zurkow at the Whitney, if not gods. A billboard still stands in a schematic but wonderfully detailed landscape. A picnic table has its place, too, right in the foreground, with a pond of sorts in the middle distance. Every so often, the sky teems with butterflies, lending their color to video’s artificial chill. People join them as well, in bear-fur blackface and comic yellow hazmat suits, and they better work fast. That pond is really a sinkhole, and a picnic, if any, would by now have already sunk.

The cast soon retires, leaving the blank billboard, an abandoned backyard grill, and a wintry landscapes. This is her Mesocosm—not a microcosm of devotional energy, but a middle ground where it might not be safe to kneel or to stand. Zurkow pairs it with The Earth Eaters, a second video still more dire in what it shows. An eruption every few seconds spills molten rock, roughly where the sinkhole has its dangers in Mesocosm. The real earth eaters are the humans who did the damage in extracting resources and leaving the rest to a dismal fate. Her animation has a cosmic and comic energy all the same.

It also has a sculptural counterpart just outside on the terrace, also through January 11, where Zurkow responds to the Whitney Museum site by the Hudson, much as her video responds to its source code. There The River Is a Circle, which sounds downright hopeful. A teardrop in shape, like the results of a map search, rises to a well-crafted wood bench. Naturally enough, though, no seating permitted, with or without a picnic. A sphere behind it echoes the science behind a buckyball by Buckminster Fuller, and blue tubes have their own charm and precision. The Whitney has its site-specific art, too, by David Hammons, in place of a former pier (just south of Barry Diller’s Little Island). Oh, the trade-offs in a return to earth.

For Vitra at SculptureCenter, the solution is simple. She can show her love for nature and its resources through her art, through July 28. A work titled Amulets should ward off harm, to humans or the earth, but here the curtains are light as feathers. Feathers cover the entrance wall, dyed a clear white and deep blue that should draw anyone closer to appreciate their art. The mineral dye, lapis lazuli, is from Brazil but perhaps better known from a poem named for it by William Butler Years. Its color is at once sky blue and electric.

It aims, in other words, to show both beauty and respect, like another offering to the gods. As Yeats wrote, “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche.” Minas Gerais, the place Vitra calls home, is rich in iron ore and other minerals, and she throws in both, in ceramics that morph into drum sets and towers into bowls for precious metals. Arrows point upward and outward as protection from further mining. White fabric wraps the whole, like bandages for a broken earth. More feathers produce a white curtain.

Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona have the small back room though June 9 for a slide show and performance, growing steadily in volume and determination to an anticlimactic standoff. Suffice it to say that its lovers do not get along. (It lost me.) Vitra by comparison may seem to avoid hard questions, but she takes due care to construct a proper offering. The installation winds its stately way through the gallery, as a tribute to her ancestors. To quote Yeats again, “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

If you have not dropped in at the Whitney in a while, now could be the time. You may never again receive such a warm welcome, but beware: you may come away wondering if its welcome is meant for you.

The lobby gallery is always free, already a welcome and welcoming gesture. Give the museum due credit. Its shows almost always focus on emerging artists, too, another gesture of outreach from the imperious art world. Now, though, it gestures in American Sign Language, an unprecedented sign of inclusion—and on a scale all but impossible to overlook. Two enormous red arms are wiggling their way to you. Christine Sun-Kim is something of a gatekeeper herself, as can happen in support of DEI, but you need not speak any one language to get the message, through July 6.

Together, the two arms reach across the gallery and to each other, one inflating as the other collapses. One hand points toward its destination, a niche cut into stone, with a gesture familiar enough to anyone: pay attention, and not just to me. The other wiggles, its palm open and facing down. That gesture depends on ASL for its meaning, a plea for recognition. It could ask to initiate a true dialogue or for you to hold back, to give the deaf space and time.

Which one? Sun-Kim gets three floors of the Whitney, not all free, for “All Day All Night” and what comes to seem a gesture of certainty. She is joined on video by her partner, but as part of the same silent lecture. In works on paper and on the wall, she creates pretty much her own language and never stops talking. Why, one drawing asks, do her parents use ASL, too? Because they are way cooler than your parents, because they love her, and because they understand other visual sign systems as well—such as pie charts, Venn diagrams, and musical notation.

Well, maybe not the part about other systems, but she sure makes use of them, on her own terms. She borrows musical notes for their shape alone, stacked like chairs. Her circles overlap as in set theory, but their placement is meaningless. Her pie charts have any number of data points, but their width is meaningless, too. I borrowed two of her answers to the question about her parents and threw in a third just for fun. I cannot swear that it makes a difference.

To be sure, her many languages extend the welcome, and only a terrible pedant would expect a music or math lesson. Her adaptations show a welcome ingenuity and sense of humor, maybe even artistry. They address what could otherwise be a contradiction, a plea for ASL that in no way requires a knowledge of it from museum visitors. Besides, how nice that she is on speaking terms, so to speak, with her parents. I shall not tell you about mine. Still, the welcome and the humor vanish from the moment one starts reading.

The show’s entire premise has its limits. Sun-Kim is responding to Alexander Graham Bell (better known for the telephone), who campaigned against ASL as isolating and disabling. The deaf should learn lip reading and a full participation in the spoken word. Bell, though, died more than a hundred years ago, and the battle against him was long since won. Besides, he meant well, and the debate should down to the data, like a proper pie chart. It should come down, too, like halfway decent stand-up or performance art, to less of a tin ear.

Sun-Kim has a point, and (sigh) you better get it. Besides science, the case comes down to engaging the deaf on their own terms, as a community of the enabled and the living. And she rewards engagement with her witty notation and those enormous red hands. Charcoals outside the education department could be incipient constellations in an all-encompassing black sky. Get to the top floor, though, and she dominates the conversation with or without her parents. I want to be DEI and not a disabler (and I wrote about the point of political art or, for that matter, sound art just this spring), but art is not just about her, me, or you.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Has anything changed in forty-five years on Daufuskie Island? Will anything ever change? One can only wonder on coming to photographs of black Americans by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe at the Whitney, through April 27. She must be wondering herself.

Daufuskie was never an enchanted island, no more than the Deep South. For Moutoussamy-Ashe, though, it has become a heritage and a hidden treasure. Born in 1951, she published her series in 1981. Yet surely wedding parties still gather in their Sunday best in front of Union Baptist Church. Surely the bride still dresses in white, as does the bridesmaid walking discretely behind. Surely the men still fish in the warm air and turgid waters of the American South and still share their catch by boiling crabs. And surely Lavinia still smiles.

Or maybe not. Lavinia, known to anyone who cared as Blossum Robinson, was already getting on in years in 1979 when Moutoussamy-Ashe took her picture leaning so close to the camera that one could reach out and touch, and the community must have looked to her often for warmth and wisdom. The photographer began her visits to the island two years earlier and could hardly tear herself away. Still, everything comes to an end, and these are “The Last Gullah Islands.” They became a book, displayed along with thirteen photographs in the floor for the Whitney’s collection. It has a room to itself where Wanda Gág went on view last year, like an enclave from the fury and melancholy of America’s cities and early modern art.

African Americans came early to the Gullah Islands, and they, too, came for freedom and comfort. Former slaves acquired property off the coast of South Carolina after the Civil War, and they could fairly be proud of it. Moutoussamy-Ashe has a fondness for creature comforts herself and did much of her work for mass magazines. One can recognize the pyramid of wedding guests from any number of photos of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and extended families. It suits a place where family and community must easily blend together. She could not resist shooting another wedding, in Central Park, on her return to New York City—and, speaking of weddings, she married Arthur Ashe.

Much else, too, looks a tad conventional even in its modesty and misery. A ramshackle house and its windows barely hold onto a shutter or the wash on a line. “Aunt Tootsie” tends to her own wash while eying her children. A car with an impatient rider has blown out its windows, and a young woman leans up against a screen door that plunges her into near darkness. She becomes a study in introspection. Do I belong here, she might as well ask? Does anyone?

Still, not everything is magazine ready, and the questions keep coming. Moutoussamy-Ashe studied with Garry Winogrand, who knows the strangeness of people as much as anyone, and she became an AIDS activist when it counted most. Sometimes, too, convention does its job of keeping the past familiar. The Geechee islanders would have liked it that way. A boy carries the American flag at the head of a procession for graduation. Pride and patriotism belong to them, too.

Graduations, weddings, homes, and people—these are not portraits or events, but a way of life. It is not street photography where there are not all that many paved streets, and not documentary photography when nothing really changes. Is it trying too hard for human dignity? One could ask that about a lot of art right now, with its due celebration of diversity. Still, I can almost hear that smiling older woman, the folds in her clothes seeming to continue of their own accord in her wrinkles. Dignity is fine, but it’s me, Lavinia.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.