Since their 2018 unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the official state portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have been a pilgrimage for many, a curiosity for others, an argument for contemporary art, a clarion call for Black artists and a startling left-turn after decades of calcified propriety. To James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Obama portraits are, also, home. Their story, he said, by nature of their local subjects, makes this “a Chicago story, and knowing the Obamas’ history with the city, and their history with the museum, any possibility to show the Obama portraits felt incredibly important.”
So, after years of negotiations, starting June 18, “The Obama Portraits” will be shown at the Art Institute for the next two months — the first exhibition of the portraits outside of Washington, and the opening stop of a five-city nationwide tour. For Rondeau, it’s a “revitalizing moment, a chance at last to see large, robust museum crowds — and to think of large, robust museum crowds as a good and safe thing once again. We want this exhibition to become a turning point.”
As if the Obama portraits didn’t already carry a lot of baggage.
So much has been said, written, tweeted and argued about these works — depicting two of the most recognizable people on Earth, painted by contemporary art stars Kehinde Wiley (former President Barack Obama) and Amy Sherald (first lady Michelle Obama) — it’s easy to assume there’s nothing more to say. You would be wrong. The first thing to know is: Wear sensible shoes. If the National Portrait Gallery is any indication — two-hour waits, for months and months — waiting times are expected to be biblical. (The Art Institute is offering free admission to Illinois residents the first week of the exhibit. Plus the portraits don’t require a separate ticket.)
The next thing to know is, there is a great deal to know.
“At the heart of these two paintings is an incredible opportunity for Chicago to wonder about portraiture and art itself,” said Richard Powell, a longtime professor of art history at Duke University (and native of Woodlawn). “It’s a chance to think about how an artist creates a likeness, then aims for something deeper, into the soul of the person being painted. It’s also, of course, a chance for more debate about these works. Which are, above all, important as art.”
That said, in honor of the 44th president: 44 things to know about the Obama portraits.
1. If nothing else, know this: These are not just pictures of two people sitting. These are “no less than revolutionary” in how they break from a tradition of presidential portraiture, said Art Institute curator Jordan Carter. “They draw historical links between portraiture and power, they get across who was once worthy of being painted, and they offer new possibilities.” Rondeau added: “They don’t stand apart from the contemporary art conversation, like a lot of presidential portraits. They reflect on identity, gender. They insist on relevant images of Black people, and though they showcase celebrities, you relate to them as individuals.” Most remarkably, they satisfy the need for official portraits without watering down the artists. With melancholy, they point to how much has been lost to decades of uninspired political portraits.
2. The Art Institute isn’t saying how many they expect to visit “The Obama Portraits” but here’s a clue: In the 50-plus year history of the National Portrait Gallery (which is part of the Smithsonian), the Obama portraits “were popular in a way no presidential portraits have ever been,” said Taína Caragol, curator of painting, sculpture and Latino art and history. After 11 months on display, the Portrait Gallery had 2.3 million visitors — one million more than usual.
3. That popularity is nearly a throwback, akin to a time before images of presidents (or anyone ) were widely available. Gilbert Stuart’s landmark “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington, for instance, was a nationwide sensation. After the Obama portraits were put up, the Portrait Gallery often heard from visitors “making a ‘pilgrimage’ to see them,” Caragol said.
4. The Portrait Gallery was asked by museums to tour the Obama portraits almost from the moment they debuted. Rondeau asked early: “I was told there were no plans yet, but I kept asking, and so I went through the Portrait Gallery, and through the (Obama) Foundation, and even through the various channels we have to the president and first lady from some of our trustees.” They “respectfully requested” that Chicago, being the Obama’s home, get first dibs.
5. The portraits will be shown in the Contemporary Wing’s large ground-floor space. You’ll move through wide S-shaped galleries, past images of the artist’s processes, past a map of Chicago “showing you this is where it started,” Carter said. Then the room opens to reveal the portraits. In all, in anticipation of a blockbuster, the museum devoted 6,000 square feet to two paintings.
6. Since the Portrait Gallery’s paintings of presidents occupy a separate gallery within the museum, the two portraits of the Obamas were never intended to be exhibited in the same gallery space. Here, they’ll be side by side, slightly angled toward each other, “as if in dialogue,” Carter said.
7. Which is fitting, of course. On the Obamas’ first date in the late 1980s, they walked around the Art Institute, then went to see “Do the Right Thing” at Water Tower Place. In her memoir “Becoming,” Michelle, a South Shore native, describes visiting downtown occasionally as a child, traveling to the museum with her siblings “like astronauts in the capsule of my dad’s Buick.”
8. Wiley said he and Barack wanted to get across a certain accessibility in the portrait. Similarly, Rondeau said the museum is not thinking of the exhibit as a revenue builder but rather as a vehicle for drawing first-time Chicagoans who perhaps never saw themselves in the art there.
9. Like the pragmatic people depicted, the Obama portraits, by design, show a touch of the conservative. The works are as full of gravitas as traditional portraiture, and though it seems risky for a president to go necktie-free, that’s not new to the genre. (Reagan did it, and Kennedy did away with a jacket entirely.) Even the gray of Michelle’s skin: Sherald paints most of her figures this way, partly to reflect on how early photography represented Black Americans.
10. Wiley and Sherald are the first Black artists to paint White House portraits. Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey, known himself for portraits of Black Americans, said: “The historic weight of the first Black president had to culminate in portraits made by Black artists, and not any Black artists, but two younger artists whose works embodies a forward-looking approach to painting and portraiture.”
11. Over the past four decades, the National Portrait Gallery has been more involved with choosing official portrait artists. For the Obamas, the process lasted two years. They received more than a dozen portfolios. Artist backgrounds are heavily vetted. Sherald said. “When you arrive (at the White House), they know you. They even knew that my sister titles all of my paintings.”
12. “When I was being considered, it was for either painting,” Sherald said, “but I had my heart on Michelle. When the president asked ‘How would you paint me?’ I said I never thought about it.” Michelle said later at the unveiling, when they met, “Barack kind of faded into the woodwork.”
13. Wiley, an art star for 20 years now, rose to fame with portraits of Black men recast into 17th century European aristocratic splendor, astride horses, holding regal poses, set against walls of foliage. He shares with Chicago-based superstar Kerry James Marshall (a major influence on Wiley) an interest in placing Black figures into historically closed-off art world scenarios (such as portraiture). As Barack Obama has said: “I was always struck by, whenever I saw (Wiley’s) portraits, the degree to which they challenged our conventional views of power and privilege.”
14. If Wiley, 44, seems familiar, it’s partly because the Los Angeles-native’s paintings have been widely embraced by hip hop culture. His paintings routinely appeared on “Empire,” his subjects have included Michael Jackson and Jay-Z (both on white steeds, looking Napoleon-esque).
15. Sherald, 47, is from Georgia. Aside from taking time off time to care for family (then her own heart transplant at 39), she’s painted for decades, her signature straddling portraiture and conceptualism. Until painting her Michelle Obama, she was unknown. “It’s hard now to remember that Amy Sherald really came to public attention with this commission,” said Bey, who served on a National Portrait Gallery committee that awarded her first place in a 2016 contest.
16. At the time she was being considered for the commission, she had a solo show at West Town’s moniquemeloche gallery, an early supporter of Sherald’s paintings. Monique Meloche herself first learned of Sherald through a client, former Chicago Bulls guard Darrell Walker. She said: “When it was time for Amy to go to the White House for a meeting with Michelle and Barack, we hastily printed out images of her paintings with our press release and a couple of reviews (then put them) in an Office Depot binder for her to bring with her.” (Incidentally, Chicago’s Hoffman Gallery also hosted Wiley’s first solo exhibit, way back in 2002.)
17. Though Sherald and Wiley are now known for painting the powerful, both began with everyday people they approached on the street. Sherald gave long, careful considerations to her subjects who, Meloche said, “possessed past, present and future. … If Michelle Obama wasn’t Michelle Obama and Amy encountered her on the street, she would have stopped her.”
18. Brandon Breaux, a Chicago-based artist known for his portraits (including his album covers for Chance the Rapper), finds it easier to paint someone who isn’t known. “At some level it’s a confidence thing — you’re not met with expectations. I just did a portrait of John Lewis (for a collection of the late congressman’s writings, coming in July) and you’re handling history, considering the moment. There is pressure to get it right. But it’s a conversation. Your body of work represents you. So you want to honor the person but you want to distinguish your work.”
19. Powell, whose 2008 book “Cutting a Figure” was a study of Black portraiture, notes that before the 1970s, formal portraits of Black Americans depicting a variety of socioeconomic classes, simply didn’t exist. Not until the 1990s. Results had long been a double-edged sword: It was important to have Black portraiture, “yet a lot of times the sitter had no control of who was painting or if the artist understood the fraught and complicated histories” of their subjects.
20. For the past couple of decades, partly thanks to acclaimed artists such as Bey, Marshall and Breaux, Chicago has become a gravitating focus for innovative portraits of Black Americans.
21. With a handful of exceptions, until the Obama portraits, presidential portraiture got a shrug at best. It was a staid, predictable tradition without a lot of serious consideration. You think of polished wooden desks and thousand-yard stares and Andrew Jackson looking like an archduke. Reagan was not in love with his final major portrait, and Bill Clinton — casual, grinning, in a long red tie and dark suit, looking like a dad who rushed to his son’s soccer game — reportedly hated his portrait as well. When I asked Rondeau if he actually likes presidential portraiture, he said: “Of course I do!” I said: “You do?” He said: “No! But it’s also not to be entirely discounted.”
22. When we think of presidential portraits, we picture the kind of stiff images of CEOs that clutter corporate headquarters throughout the Chicago suburbs, reflecting a top-down history of lineage. They often look as silly as the haunted artworks inside a Scooby-Doo mansion.
23. Though the purpose of presidential portraiture is posterity, the broader goal is flattery, a formal eagerness to give history a note of warm PR. (No less than Norman Rockwell delivered a smiling, genial portrait of Richard Nixon.) The tradition of a formal commissioned portrait, though, is relatively new: “It only began with George H.W. Bush,” said Kate Lemay, senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery. “Simply, the Gallery needs portraits of presidents and some (Garfield, for example), we just don’t have many. It’s easier to commission than collect.”
24. And the good presidential portraits? Of the historians, curators and artists I asked, three outliers were mentioned most often: The dramatic Washington “Landsdowne” portrait, Elaine de Kooning’s abstract expressionistic JFK and John Singer Sargent’s glowering 1903 painting of Teddy Roosevelt (the two men barked at each other throughout the process).
25. Michelle Obama likened Sherald’s job to cooking Thanksgiving dinner for someone you barely know. Bey said the difficulty of a portrait commission is balancing the need to satisfy the client with the desire to reflect your own ambitions. He said that he once did a commission for a couple of their two adult children. He liked the results, “but the mother was unsettled” by how her son appeared in the photograph. She insisted the image didn’t feel like her son and wanted to return and cancel the portrait. “She wanted a portrait that confirmed her sense of her son.”
26. Many have noted the surreal quality of the Michelle Obama portrait. Powell said, that’s likely because the image moves away academic verisimilitude of traditional renderings of first ladies, “for a flat — I don’t mean that negatively — image, with everything right there on the surface.”
27. Many more have noted that Barack Obama seems to float in his portrait. As Wiley describes it on the Art Institute’s audio tour, the president is somewhat fighting a war with the thicket of noise going on behind him, competing for “who gets to be the star of the show.” (Which, of course, sounds like a metaphor for the endless criticism directed at the first Black president.)
28. The flowers in that wall of foliage chart Barack Obama’s history: The jasmine symbolizes his Hawaiian birth, the African lilies represent his father’s Kenyan background and the chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago.
29. The president appears casual. No tie, no desk, no papers. In retail politics-speak, you want to have a beer with this guy. It reminds Powell of the 1869 George Peter Alexander Healy portrait of Lincoln, who is also seated in a chair, leaning forward. Portraits of seated presidents are uncommon. But both Lincoln and Obama were tall. Giving them a seat allows for a full body.
30. Michelle’s dress: It came from Milly, a smart, approachable department store brand whose steepest prices average around $400. The patterns reminded Sherald of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, an Alabama peninsula with a tradition of sewing art from repurposed clothing.
31. The goal of a smart portrait is to dig beneath a physical image and reveal something of the interior. The facial expression is only a part of that, but as critic Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote, Barack Obama’s portrait carries such an air of focused engagement, the image becomes a concerted effort to correct criticisms of Obama as “philosophically detached.”
32. Breaux told me that making a portrait has to be about showing love and appreciating people. “It has to be ‘This is how I see you — this is my visual representation of love.’ A portrait was the first thing I ever made. I did it when I was three, drawing my mom. Pencil and loose-leaf paper.”
33. The Obama portraits, as forward-thinking as they are, also confirm our usual cultural images of the Obamas. Barack appears full of heavy purpose and thought; Michelle looks self-possessed and practical. Her background is calming; his looks like a constant encroachment.
34. About that chair Barack Obama sits in. Wiley said he painted out of samples of chairs. That chair doesn’t exist. Except, of course, it looks like many 18th century mahogany chairs, and here, it becomes a time machine, allowing our first Black president to keep a foot in two worlds.
35. Barack Obama said at the unveiling: “Nobody in my family tree, as far as I can tell, had a portrait done. I do have my high school yearbook picture, which is no great shakes.”
36. A painting’s wall text, typically innocuous, becomes a dance with a presidential painting. At the National Portrait Gallery, critics groused that Obama’s increased used of drone strikes and his inability to close Guantanamo were mentioned, but not his reputation as “Deporter-in-Chief.”
37. If you’re wondering: Former President Donald Trump doesn’t have an official portrait yet. (“We are still in the process of commissioning it,” said Lemay of the National Portrait Gallery.)
38. The Obama portraits, which cost a reported $500,000, were paid for entirely through private donations. (One of the lead donors for the commission was director Steven Spielberg.)
39. A few of the initial reactions. Washington Post: “Powerful.” ARTnews: “Weird, and that’s what makes it memorable.” The Arizona Republic: “I was among the five gazillion idiots on the internet who took one look at the (Barack) portrait and thought ‘He looks like Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge.'”
40. Another echo: Powell, in the exhibit catalog, notes a startling resemble between the Michelle Obama and an 1868 photograph of Harriet Tubman sitting sideways, arm over a chair back, wearing a large white dress pooling outward. “Although there is no evidence that Sherald was aware of this photograph,” he writes, the result is “a meta-narrative of feminine strength.”
41. This begs repeating: That we’re still discussing a work of presidential portraiture three years later and saying things like “meta-narrative” and “radical choices,” it speaks to just how much these paintings have entered the current conversation on contemporary art. “Whether this signals a change for (presidential portraiture) in the future, who really knows?” said Jordan Carter. “Not to be cynical, but the Obamas, before this, they did know contemporary art.”
42. Since John Adams was the first president to live in the White House, its walls were staid: landscapes, portraits of leaders, etc. It stayed like this for decades. Laura Bush hung a Jacob Lawrence, Hillary Clinton had a Georgia O’Keeffe. “The Kennedys loved contemporary art,” said Ta na Caragol of the Portrait Gallery, “but the Obama’s picks for the White House showed broader understanding — particularly of how art represents history.” During their years, Alma Thomas became the first Black female artist displayed in the White House; the Oval Office had Hoppers; they hung abstractions by Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko and many others.
43. The Art Institute will offer four new self-guided tours tied to the Obama portraits: a tour of contemporary artists the Obamas hung in the White House; a tour of Chicago art; a selection of important portraiture; and a family-oriented survey about art as a vehicle for positive change.
44. And the future of these portraits? It’s not fixed or certain, Wiley said in a phone interview from Ghana. “Like the presidency, it’s a work in progress. And like democracy, there’s not one version. There’s ways of thinking about (these paintings), and what was liberating, after making the work, was to take myself out of it, to take away the comings and goings of how people see this as an object, and just allow the full of arc of time to take hold. Which is what museums can do. But the painting, I think it’ll endure. At least for as long as the American presidency does.”
“The Obama Portraits” runs June 18 to Aug. 15 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. Access is included with general admission ($20-$35). As part of ongoing COVID precautions at the museum (as of press time), advance ticket purchases are required for the public (but not members) and masks and social distancing remain in practice. The checkroom, restaurants, libraries and the Ryan Learning Center remain closed. Free week for Illinois residents is June 18-25, online reservations are required. Tickets are on sale now through June 30, with tickets for July and August to be released at later dates to be announced. Once at the museum, virtual lines for “The Obama Portraits” will help with wait times. Visitors can scan QR codes on their smartphones and be texted for their turn to enter the exhibit. Check wait times in advance and get tickets and more information at 312-443-3600 and www.artic.edu
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
