Catch Sherald's show at the lauded gallery in DTLA's Art District while you still can. The exhibition ends on June 6th.
There's an exhibition I think you should catch before it ends at Hauser & Wirth: Amy Sherald's The Great American Fact. Sherald does something revolutionary in her portraiture of Black Americans. She shows Black people in the suburbs and at leisure. She shows Black joy.
This is why the painting of a Black surfer on a beach is so boundaries-breaking, as is that of a Black woman in a sundress resting against her bicycle. Sherald's portraits not only introduce Black faces to the canon of American art history, but she shows Black Americans in ways that we typically only see white Americans in paintings.
By painting Black Americans happily enjoying life, without weapons, without angered or pained faces, and outside of the squalor of the projects, Sherald indeed sheds light on "the great American fact": Black people have always been a part of this country, though white people have controlled the narrative.
If Black Americans have been included in the media at all, so often they are depicted as criminals, drug addicts, or miserable, impoverished people. Even when famed white painter Norman Rockwell created his iconic painting, The Problem We All Live With, which depicted Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old Black girl who had to be escorted by U.S. Marshalls so she could attend an all-white public school during the desegregation of the Jim Crow South, he painted an image of Black anguish and struggle.
Yes, Rockwell’s famous work captured the dismantling of racist laws in this country, but the viewer is also asked to witness a Black child as she walks past racial slurs scrawled on the wall of her school. The perspective is ostensibly of the white racist protesters who didn’t want her to attend this school because of her skin color.
On the contrary, in Sherald's work, Black Americans are not depicted as they encounter racism but as they enjoy life. They are described, not from the viewpoint of a white painter but from that of the Black painter herself.
Sherald shows Black Americans as they exist beyond stereotypes. Through her paintings, she portrays the America she knows.
These images are her "great American fact." They are the fact of all Americans.
By showcasing Sherald's work for her first solo exhibition, Hauser & Wirth also helps to bridge the racial gap in this country. Black Americans have too often been excluded from the American story. They have been excluded from the upper echelons of the art world.
Sherald's exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is a step to fix this omission.