AMY SHERALD

The focus of my musings came to center on Sherald’s flattened figures, which bear a resemblance to those of Alex Katz and Marcia Marcus in the 1960s-70s. During the Cold War, the practice of flattening, impersonalizing, and distancing served as a critical response to both the prevailing political climate and the emergence of a media-saturated environment – it also brought things into line with the dominant formalist aesthetic of the day. These strategies mirrored the overwhelming flatness of mass media, which wielded considerable influence over perception and rapidly altered the ways people saw and understood the world. Our present social context is characterized by an excess of media inputs that overwhelm the senses and undermine any sense of rootedness. Lived experience is increasingly reduced to snapshots—fleeting moments captured in the stark, flattening light of digital immediacy, where depth and context are smoothed into a uniform, homogenized surface. In this flattened world, Sherald’s cool, abstracted approach now seems more indicative of alienation than a deliberate, critical response to the image-saturated reality we currently inhabit. As such, Sherald’s work appears symptomatic.

From the perspective of contemporary media theory, scholars such as Vilém Flusser have examined how images now function as models of reality, complicating our understanding of representation, identity, and authenticity. Flusser and others argue that, for instance, selfies are not merely photographs but rather the documentation of highly conscious staged performances. These performances negotiate competing ideals, stylized behaviors, and social filters. This observation extends to all portraiture: portraits, too, exist at the intersection of multiple subjectivities, technologies, and social expectations, offering images that are simultaneously documentary and highly mediated. Viewers scrutinize these images, seeking to differentiate authenticity from artifice as they oscillate between skepticism and credulity. The results are both regulatory and playful, directive and affective, reflecting the paradoxes of our post-historical, post-truth, and postmodern era. In an image-saturated, politically polarized world, it is critical to recognize that stylistic choices are never neutral—they reflect political anxieties, technological changes, and ongoing cultural debate. For these reasons, portraiture and issues of identity have become, for many artists, a default subject, providing a vital platform for exploring and questioning the complexities of selfhood and social belonging.

While contemporary discussions often frame the exploration of portraiture and identity as a recent development, this impulse is not new. Consider, for example, the approaches of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Charles White (1918–1979). Sargent’s Paris works are celebrated for their ambitious, sensuous realism and dynamic brushwork, and for his ability to capture both the personality and social status of his sitters—often wealthy and glamorous women. Alice Neel, in contrast, brought unflinching psychological intensity to her portraits of her friends , neighbors and neighbors , often depicting her marginalized and overlooked sitters with raw honesty. Charles White, working in a mannerist style, portrayed working-class Black sitters with dignity and social consciousness, emphasizing humanity and resilience. Neel and White’s social awareness offers a striking contrast to the vanity of Sargent’s elite subjects.

Among contemporary artists, Barkley Hendricks (1945–2017)—the subject of the exhibition Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick (Frick Madison, September 21, 2023 – January 7, 2024)—stands out as Sherald’s closest peer in Black portraiture. Both artists center Black subjects against vibrant monochrome backgrounds, yet their approaches diverge significantly. Hendricks employs hyperrealism, drawing on Old Master traditions to assert his subjects’ individuality, psychological depth, and contemporary style. In contrast, Sherald uses grayscale skin tones and staged, flattened scenes that reference photography and commercial imagery. But the  key distinction lies in their priorities: Hendricks’s vivid realism emphasizes his subjects’ uniqueness and agency, while Sherald’s focus on fashion, grayscale skin, and composed poses deconstructs how identity is communicated and perceived. 

This divergence reflects the post-black ideology articulated by Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon in 2001—a movement that seeks to explore the multiplicity of Black experiences and aesthetics. As  such, Sherald’s engagement with the political realities of visibility and exclusion seeks to move beyond the confines of the iconography of identity politics—even as her work draws upon them for its power. By inserting stylized, flattened Black subjects into blank, monochrome backgrounds, she neutralizes conventional markers of class and identity, expanding the iconography of Black representation beyond reductive binaries. Her intent is to rethink and broaden the visual vocabulary of Blackness while maintaining a subtle awareness of audience expectations. This strategy positions her subjects as representative types rather than specific individuals or symbols, yet by clearly identifying them as Black, she leverages the very frameworks of identity she critiques. The result is a practice that is both critical and accommodating: it interrogates viewer assumptions while inviting them to reimagine Black presence and belonging in contemporary society.

Ultimately, the semiotics of these paintings generate a complex, self-contradictory dialogue about what constitutes identity, visibility, and presence—inviting critique based on what society or institutions expect of an African American artist painting images of Black people. A distinction is drawn here between Black artists and African American art, for they reference two different traditions. The difference is not merely semantic, but deeply consequential for how identity, visibility, and presence are understood and represented. Unlike Black artists who may draw from global or diasporic experiences, African American artists are culturally and historically tasked with responding to the legacies of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism, while also celebrating resilience, community, and self-determination.

The ambiguity of the artist’s position arises from the interplay between implied obligations and the formal language employed, directing attention to qualities flattened or abstracted in the process. This tension raises the critical question: do these need to be portraits of Black people? The visual strategy subtly asserts the subjects’—and the artist’s own—place within mainstream culture, even as it underscores the exclusions that have historically shaped those spaces. By adopting the formal language of modernist painting—flat color fields, stylized realism, and an emphasis on surface and composition—Sherald reconciles social and political aims with accessible criticality. Here, formalism functions symbolically as an analogy for exclusion: just as modernist flatness and abstraction often strip subjects of lived context, so too have Black individuals been erased or abstracted in dominant cultural narratives.