The Obamas presidential portraits are heading to Boston this fall – The Boston Globe
The portraits, commissioned by the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., have been on a five-city traveling exhibition since June with stops in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston. The tour will now include a stopover at San Franciscos de Young Museum before arriving at the MFA for a two-month exhibition this fall (Sept. 3 Oct. 30). The portraits will then return home to the NPG, which organized the tour.
Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery, said numerous museums have expressed interest in exhibiting the works since the NPG first unveiled them in 2018.
Ive never had so many friends since these portraits were created, quipped Sajet, who called the MFA a really good match. We, as part of the Smithsonian, feel its our mission to reach as many people across the country as we can. It just seems like a good thing to do.
So how did the MFA make its case?
We phoned them, said MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum, who added the portraits will help foster conversation about leadership, community, and future generations. We were thinking about many of the issues that were dealing with as a nation, but also as an institution, trying to represent, in our case, a museum that belongs to all of Boston.
The large-scale paintings, which diverge dramatically from previous presidential portraits, were widely embraced by critics and the public: According to press accounts, the NPG recorded some 50,000 visitors during the 2018 Presidents Day weekend three times more than had entered the museum that same weekend the previous year.
Wiley and Sherald were the first Black artists ever to receive the NPG commission, and one critic observed that their portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama combine traditional representation with elements that underscore the complexity of their subjects, and the historic fact of their political rise.
In his portrait of Barack Obama, Wiley depicted his subject leaning forward in an ornately carved chair, wearing a blazer but no tie, before a verdant background. Wiley, whose work often invokes elements of heroic European portraiture to depict modern Black subjects, here features a variety of flowers to describe Obamas personal history.
Wiley talked about that at the unveiling, he said [Obama] is in this sort of garden of his biography, said Sajet, who highlighted, among the paintings other flowers, the chrysanthemum, official flower of Chicago, where Obama got his political start.
Much has been made of the fact that [Wiley] really broke with all sorts of traditions, said Sajet. But if you really look closely at it, [he] knows his art history extraordinarily well, she continued, adding that Wiley not so much broke with traditions, but built upon traditions, and then put them on their head.
Similarly, Sheralds portrait of Michelle Obama presents her seated against a light-blue background. She wears a flowing evening gown with a modern geometric pattern designed by Milly, her chin resting upon her right hand, nails painted periwinkle. But perhaps most notable is Sheralds gray-scale treatment of her skin tone, which Sajet said is reminiscent of the black-and-white photographs that first began to democratize portraiture.
Portraiture favored those who could vote: white men who owned land, said Sajet, describing how historical portraits rarely included subjects outside that group. Sherald is very astute on the history of Black portraiture, and how it became democratized and celebrated thanks to camera technology, and so that gray skin tone of Michelle Obamas plays into that tradition.
The portraits star power has endured on the tour, where each venue has presented the paintings alongside complementary exhibitions or programming. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for instance, organized an exhibition of Black portraiture in conjunction with the Obama paintings.
The paintings are currently on view at Atlantas High Museum of Art, following stops at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and LACMA. They will then head to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and San Francisco before arriving in Boston.
At the MFA, home to an enviable portraiture collection of its own including Gilbert Stuarts 1796 portrait of George Washington and John Singleton Copleys 1768 portrait of Paul Revere the Obama portraits will play against a rich, complicated tradition.
Thats one of the reasons were very excited for the portraits to go to the MFA Boston, because they have all those traditional portraits, said Sajet, who added it will be impactful to see . . . disrupting the status quo.
While the MFA plans to make a clear path between the Obama portraits and the MFAs own collection, Teitelbaum said the museum is also planning a broader community project to accompany the portraits.
Were going to show them on their own, but in relationship to a community-based project that engages artists of all ages in making portraits of leaders in their communities, he said, adding that the museum is still working out the details. It makes the point that through artistic representation, you can bring alive the values and the meaning of communities today.
Teitelbaum added that the exhibition, which will be presented in the Lois B. and Michael K. Torf Gallery, also will include other programming both on-site and in neighborhoods around Boston.
These are two great artists, he said. Its going to be a very energetic and very engaged moment at the MFA.
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @malcolmgay.
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The Obamas presidential portraits are heading to Boston this fall - The Boston Globe