Amy Sherald at the BMA: Politics of the Black Body in Visual Arts

My students and I were fortunate enough to visit the Baltimore Museum of Art recently to view the Amy Sherald: American Sublime exhibition. https://artbma.org/exhibition/amy-sherald-american-sublime. The show was absolutely stunning and the most surprising element was the scale of her paintings; they were semi-colossal. The richness and vibrancy of the colors and the figures could have stepped right off the canvas, beautifully rendered.

Our recent class discussion was around 20th century visual art and artists and the AbEx art movement. Their textbook mentioned that abstract expressionist artists did not directly address political issues in their work, however members of the Black Arts Movement, 1965 - 1975 made it central to their aesthetic mission. The text goes on to say that artists were influenced by a maelstrom of civil unrest and sweeping changes in racial attitudes, many African-American artists felt compelled to  create political art. Racial violence in the 1950’s sparked within artists a movement to shed light on discrimination, oppression, and inequality.

Today, artists continue to feel obliged to create works of art that are ‘political’ in nature. Contemporary artist Amy Sherald said, "Painting Black figures, whether I want it to be or not, it's political. The Black body is political."  Her use of grayscale, a technique known as grisaille that was used in the Renaissance to imitate sculpture, aims to reduce the emphasis on race.

It is important for my students and I to discuss race, the black body, and politics as themes in contemporary art and how artists of color continue to stand on the front line in the fight for racial justice and equality. The voices of today's artists continue to articulate a visual narrative of culture, self-expression, and black representation.

~Professor Queen

ART 228-200 Textbook: Farrington, Lisa. African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017

ISBN 978-0-19-999539-4