I’m sorry to hit you with this so early in the morning (or at whatever time of the day it is that you are reading this), but put your notes away and clear your desks – I have a pop quiz for you. Well, actually I have a mom quiz – nonetheless, put everything away, no talking, and remember – keep your mind’s eye on your own inner awareness, understandings and perceptions. This is just a quick, one-question formative assessment to see where we all are.
Ready? Here’s the question:
Imagine you are strolling through an exhibit at an art museum, and you enter a gallery where controlled lighting illuminates a painting before you called “Mother and Child.” What does the painting look like? Describe it in a mental paragraph of at least five sentences.
NO CHEATING – AND DO NOT LOOK AT THE IMAGES BELOW UNTIL YOU’VE COMPLETED YOUR PARAGRAPH.
Ready? Here’s the question:
Imagine you are strolling through an exhibit at an art museum, and you enter a gallery where controlled lighting illuminates a painting before you called “Mother and Child.” What does the painting look like? Describe it in a mental paragraph of at least five sentences.
NO CHEATING – AND DO NOT LOOK AT THE IMAGES BELOW UNTIL YOU’VE COMPLETED YOUR PARAGRAPH.
Okay, if you’ve finished your description, you can now look at the images above, the results of a search on “mother and child paintings" – and below, Amy Sherald’s painting “Mother and Child.” Which looks most like you described? No need to answer now – that was just a rhetorical question.
NOTE: I didn’t run a search for depictions of “Madonna and Child" paintings, but can you imagine the reaction (dare I say "outrage") by conservative White America had Sherald dubbed her painting thusly?
Were this the case, I suspect ire would boil over in some White/"religious" circles stemming from an inability to see beyond traditional, Eurocentric cultural imagery. Were this the case, narrow-minded “godly” congregants would view the depiction as an attack by "woke" ideology and political correctness. Were this the case, starchy fundamentalists would view the work as “inauthentic" – and the truth of the matter is – nothing could be further from the truth.
Sherald’s painting is of two individuals, a Black mother and her child. What beyond that does the viewer have to consider? Their clothes; their posture; their facial expressions. There is no background to provide context for preconceptions.
AN ASIDE: Hmm…this brought to mind a memory from my past. I remember I was in a suit. At the time, I was the principal at a middle school, and I did dress “professionally” on most days, but it was not often that I wore an actual suit – but on this particular day, I remember I was wearing a suit. I was heading into a local post office, and a woman was outside standing by a small table and holding a clipboard. She asked if I would add my signature to her petition – I believe it had something to do with water. Water purity? Water cleanliness? Something to do with water and the local environment?
She thrust her clipboard toward me with the signature page and asked for me to sign. I asked if I could see the petition – I did support her cause, but I wanted to see what it was I was about to put my name to. She didn’t have a copy of the petition. She only had her verbal description of it – and the signature page.
I declined to sign, and as I walked away, I was met with a barrage of insults all centered on my appearance – a gray-haired, middle-aged white man in a suit. This was before the Trumpocene Era, so think barbed epithets comparing me to the likes of George H. Bush and Newt Gingrich.
I didn’t say anything back. I entered the post office and went about my business, but all I could think was, “Great Scott, that woman doesn’t know me at all.”
ANOTHER ASIDE: Who was “Great Scott”? I looked it up. The saying most likely originates from 19th-century references to U.S. Army General Winfield Scott, who was nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Well, in this case, I was more “Great Scott,” and the woman with the clipboard was more “Fuss and Feathers “ – but I say all of this because Sherald leaves us with nothing but appearance when we view and judge her painting “Mother and Child.”
In exploring this work, I found one article (HERE) that succinctly described what was going on in the United States at the time Sherald created it:
“From 2012 to 2020, Black people were repeatedly desecrated by state and vigilante forces; images of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and others circulated widely. Elizabeth Alexander named the young Black Americans who came of age during this period the Trayvon Generation, after Trayvon Martin, who was killed at seventeen by a civilian who wanted to be a policeman in Florida.”
Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. Michael Brown was gunned down in 2014. Eric Garner was killed in 2014. Tamir Rice was shot to death in 2014. There were many others. Sherald painted “Mother and Child” in 2016. Later came the murders of Elijah McClain (2019) and George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breanna Taylor (2020). Again, there are many other names prior to and after 2016, but I mention this because I look at the facial expression of Sherald’s “Mother” and see disbelief if not disgust as to what was/is going on in our society.
The article I mentioned above continued:
The egregious death of Sonya Massey at the hands of a police officer in 2024 suggests that this period is not over. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken new aim at Black histories, targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington; the museum’s former director, Kevin Young, left his position last month.”
The article, entitled "Amy Sherald’s Sacred Monuments, Black portraiture in an iconoclastic age," was written by Aaron Robertson for "Commonweal" magazine, and provides an excellent narrative about the painting as related to sacred, recent societal events, and other artworks:
Sherald’s engagement with the sacred is deliberate, a humane response to an age that seems intent on denying human dignity. Her Mother and Child (2016) builds on the long practice of Black artists riffing on Marian iconography. The Black nationalist and artist Glanton Dowdell resurrected the motif as a countercultural symbol in the 1960s for the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a Pan-African Orthodox Christian church in Detroit. Since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement around 2013, other contemporary artists like Titus Kaphar, Mark Doox, Kate Egawa, and Oasa DuVerney have all incorporated Virgin and Child imagery into their work, often as meditations on the mortality of Black women and their children, usually their sons. Sherald’s version is perhaps most directly in conversation with the late Elizabeth Catlett’s unsentimental Madonna II (1991) linocut. These children—girls, it seems—are not playful Raphaelite cherubs, but are instead preternaturally perceptive, plainly dressed, and awed, if not frightened, by their mother’s Byzantine solemnity. In these paintings, the sacred is not elevated above the world but embedded in its earthiest tones, its squinting, sun- and sweat-drenched laborers.
Were this the case, I suspect ire would boil over in some White/"religious" circles stemming from an inability to see beyond traditional, Eurocentric cultural imagery. Were this the case, narrow-minded “godly” congregants would view the depiction as an attack by "woke" ideology and political correctness. Were this the case, starchy fundamentalists would view the work as “inauthentic" – and the truth of the matter is – nothing could be further from the truth.
Sherald’s painting is of two individuals, a Black mother and her child. What beyond that does the viewer have to consider? Their clothes; their posture; their facial expressions. There is no background to provide context for preconceptions.
AN ASIDE: Hmm…this brought to mind a memory from my past. I remember I was in a suit. At the time, I was the principal at a middle school, and I did dress “professionally” on most days, but it was not often that I wore an actual suit – but on this particular day, I remember I was wearing a suit. I was heading into a local post office, and a woman was outside standing by a small table and holding a clipboard. She asked if I would add my signature to her petition – I believe it had something to do with water. Water purity? Water cleanliness? Something to do with water and the local environment?
She thrust her clipboard toward me with the signature page and asked for me to sign. I asked if I could see the petition – I did support her cause, but I wanted to see what it was I was about to put my name to. She didn’t have a copy of the petition. She only had her verbal description of it – and the signature page.
I declined to sign, and as I walked away, I was met with a barrage of insults all centered on my appearance – a gray-haired, middle-aged white man in a suit. This was before the Trumpocene Era, so think barbed epithets comparing me to the likes of George H. Bush and Newt Gingrich.
I didn’t say anything back. I entered the post office and went about my business, but all I could think was, “Great Scott, that woman doesn’t know me at all.”
ANOTHER ASIDE: Who was “Great Scott”? I looked it up. The saying most likely originates from 19th-century references to U.S. Army General Winfield Scott, who was nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Well, in this case, I was more “Great Scott,” and the woman with the clipboard was more “Fuss and Feathers “ – but I say all of this because Sherald leaves us with nothing but appearance when we view and judge her painting “Mother and Child.”
In exploring this work, I found one article (HERE) that succinctly described what was going on in the United States at the time Sherald created it:
“From 2012 to 2020, Black people were repeatedly desecrated by state and vigilante forces; images of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and others circulated widely. Elizabeth Alexander named the young Black Americans who came of age during this period the Trayvon Generation, after Trayvon Martin, who was killed at seventeen by a civilian who wanted to be a policeman in Florida.”
Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. Michael Brown was gunned down in 2014. Eric Garner was killed in 2014. Tamir Rice was shot to death in 2014. There were many others. Sherald painted “Mother and Child” in 2016. Later came the murders of Elijah McClain (2019) and George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breanna Taylor (2020). Again, there are many other names prior to and after 2016, but I mention this because I look at the facial expression of Sherald’s “Mother” and see disbelief if not disgust as to what was/is going on in our society.
The article I mentioned above continued:
The egregious death of Sonya Massey at the hands of a police officer in 2024 suggests that this period is not over. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken new aim at Black histories, targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington; the museum’s former director, Kevin Young, left his position last month.”
The article, entitled "Amy Sherald’s Sacred Monuments, Black portraiture in an iconoclastic age," was written by Aaron Robertson for "Commonweal" magazine, and provides an excellent narrative about the painting as related to sacred, recent societal events, and other artworks:
Sherald’s engagement with the sacred is deliberate, a humane response to an age that seems intent on denying human dignity. Her Mother and Child (2016) builds on the long practice of Black artists riffing on Marian iconography. The Black nationalist and artist Glanton Dowdell resurrected the motif as a countercultural symbol in the 1960s for the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a Pan-African Orthodox Christian church in Detroit. Since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement around 2013, other contemporary artists like Titus Kaphar, Mark Doox, Kate Egawa, and Oasa DuVerney have all incorporated Virgin and Child imagery into their work, often as meditations on the mortality of Black women and their children, usually their sons. Sherald’s version is perhaps most directly in conversation with the late Elizabeth Catlett’s unsentimental Madonna II (1991) linocut. These children—girls, it seems—are not playful Raphaelite cherubs, but are instead preternaturally perceptive, plainly dressed, and awed, if not frightened, by their mother’s Byzantine solemnity. In these paintings, the sacred is not elevated above the world but embedded in its earthiest tones, its squinting, sun- and sweat-drenched laborers.
Alas, dear reader, I've run out of time today --and I have not yet to connect the painting and these thoughts to Dickinson -- so consider this post "under construction." I shall return here tomorrow to see if I can wrap things up!
| CONTINUED ON 4/1: So what does the Belle of Amherst have to say about all of this? Well, I made no connection in my mind with any poem in which Dickinson used the word “mother” – she used that word in only nine poems, and in most, the lines were about “Mother Nature.” She used the word “Mama” once, in “Mama never forgets her birds,” sent to her cousins’ following the death of their mother. |  |
In October 1885, Dickinson wrote this to her friend Jeanie Greenough:
I had the luxury of a Mother a month longer than you, for my own Mother died in November, but the anguish also was granted me to see the first snow upon her Grave, the following Day - which, dear friend, you were spared - but Remembrance engulfs me, and I must cease -
I wish I could speak a word of courage, tho' that Love has already done. Who could be motherless who has a Mother's Grave within confiding reach? Let me enclose the tenderness which is born of bereavement. To have had a Mother - how mighty!
How mighty, indeed – a conviction reflected in the visage of Sherald”s “Mother.”
What I see when I look at her expression, and I see her gazing back at me – are you ready for this? What I see is this:
I had the luxury of a Mother a month longer than you, for my own Mother died in November, but the anguish also was granted me to see the first snow upon her Grave, the following Day - which, dear friend, you were spared - but Remembrance engulfs me, and I must cease -
I wish I could speak a word of courage, tho' that Love has already done. Who could be motherless who has a Mother's Grave within confiding reach? Let me enclose the tenderness which is born of bereavement. To have had a Mother - how mighty!
How mighty, indeed – a conviction reflected in the visage of Sherald”s “Mother.”
What I see when I look at her expression, and I see her gazing back at me – are you ready for this? What I see is this:
 | Now I’m not thinking that this woman is so discriminating that she'd allow only one into her inner circle, but at this point in time, the door is open and she’s pausing at the gate. Observing. Surveying. Returning my gaze. Will I earn her trust?   |
BONUS POEMS:
The poem above on the right, "She could not live upon the past," provided the title for this post, and it is one of the few of Dickinson's poems to include the word "mother."
Also, in exploring this topic, I found the poem "Mother and Child" by Louise Gluck:
The poem above on the right, "She could not live upon the past," provided the title for this post, and it is one of the few of Dickinson's poems to include the word "mother."
Also, in exploring this topic, I found the poem "Mother and Child" by Louise Gluck:
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