The Art Within the Soul

Back on March 19, my wife and I visited the Baltimore Museum of Art to see the exhibit of Amy Sherald’s portraiture, “American Sublime.”  A placard on the wall in one of the galleries included this: “Sherald takes inspiration from a wide range of authors – including Jane Austen, Octavia E. Butler, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison – whose work spans genres and time periods but shares a concern with the liberation of people oppressed in body, mind, or spirit.”
 
Well, you know which name jumped out at me – so on March 21, I began a multi-day special series of posts related to the exhibit “from the point of view of a Dickinson enthusiast.”  I’m sure there is more I could explore and cover (there always is), but for now, I’ll conclude with this post by tying up a few loose ends, sharing a few other poems and articles, and offering a few final thoughts. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR WHAT'S BELOW:
 
1. POEMS BY DICKINSON WHICH PROVIDED THE TITLES FOR THE POSTS
2. OTHER SHERALD PAINTINGS WITH TITLES INSPIRED BY LITERATURE OR POETRY
3. A FEW INTERESTING ARTICLES RE: AMY SHERALD
​4. CONCLUDING WORDS BY SHERALD & DICKINSON

1. POEMS BY DICKINSON WHICH PROVIDED THE TITLES FOR THE POSTS:

The title for the initial post on March 21 (HERE), “A Theme Stubborn as Sublime” – referencing the name of the exhibit, “American Sublime” – comes from line 6 of Dickinson’s poem “Some we see no more, Tenements of Wonder.”

​The title for the second post, “Testing Our Horizons” (HERE) – about Sherald’s “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons)” – plays on the opening line of Dickinson’s “These tested Our Horizon.”  The poem appears at the bottom of the post.  The title for the third post, “Then to the Royal Clouds” (HERE) – about Sherald’s painting “Kingdom” – also comes from a poem included in the post, “The nearest dream recedes – unrealized.”  However, this is not the case in the fourth post from March 24, “Silence is all we dread” (HERE) – about the paintings “Trans Forming Liberty” and “For Love, and for Country.”  That title comes from the opening line from this work by Dickinson:

The title for the post on March 25, “A Nearness to Tremendousness” – about “Pilgrimage of the Chameleon” (HERE) – comes from a poem by Dickinson which opens with that line.  However, the online Dickinson lexicon states that the term in the poem is meant to convey “Terror; dread; [amelioration] vastness; immensity; universality; enormous power; massive force; [metaphor] infinity; omnipresence; divinity; Deity.”  I used it to convey the possibility of greatness, something monumental.

“Mutual Monarch,” the title of the post on March 26 (HERE) – about Sherald’s painting “What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American)” – is from Dickinson’s poem “Me from Myself – to banish,” which is included in the post.  However, that is not so for the poem which provided the title for the March 27 post, “The Inlets of the Mind” (HERE) which discusses four different paintings.  That title comes from this poem:

“Until the Fight is Done,” the title for the post on March 28 (HERE) – about Sherald’s “As American as Apple Pie – is a line from Dickinson’s poem “Sic transit gloria mundi” (HERE).
 
In the post dated March 29, I shared “Yesterday is History,” the poem which provided the title, “Yesterday is Poetry”(HERE) – all about the painting “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”  That is also the case for the post dated March 31, entitled “What Mystery Pervades” (HERE) – focusing on two different paintings.  The poem, “What mystery pervades a well” shows as a “Bonus Poem” at the bottom of the post.

2. OTHER SHERALD PAINTINGS WITH TITLES INSPIRED BY LITERATURE OR POETRY

Sherald was inspired by lines of literature or poetry for titles for some of her paintings (for example, see the posts on March 26 and 27), but there are others, too, with titles drawn from well-known works; three examples are below (left to right), “’Hope’ Is the Thing with Feathers” with a title from a poem by Dickinson; and two paintings with titles inspired by lines from Jane Austen, “A single man in possession of a good fortune”  (from “Pride and Prejudice”) and “There Is No Charm Equal to Tenderness of Heart” (from “Emma”). 

3. A FEW INTERESTING ARTICLES RE: AMY SHERALD

I quoted Aaron Robertson's article "Amy Sherald’s Sacred MonumentsBlack portraiture in an iconoclastic age" for Commonweal Magazine  (July 2025) in yesterday's post, but I don't believe I linked to the article.  The fulll piece is HERE. It is definitely worth a read!

I also enjoyed Forbes magazines' "Artist Amy Sherald Delivers ‘The Great American Fact"  (HERE) by Tom Teicholz, a "former contributor" to the magazine and -- in his words, "a culture maven and arts enthusiast."

Here's a bit from the piece:

All the figures in Sherald’s work are Black which would be unremarkable if the appearance of Black figures in portraiture and art history were unremarkable. But it is not, and so Sherald’s work is, in part, not so much a corrective as way of opening our eyes (and that of art history’s) to the images, subjects, and persons who have always been there – if not represented often enough.

In this regard, Sherald is no more painting Black people than other painters were painting white people. She is painting the people she sees, much the same way as Alex Katz was painting the persons he came across. In fact, to render Black skin tones, Sherald uses grisaille, a method of using gray monochromes, historically used to render or imitate sculpture.

My point, however clumsily made, is that Sherald is not make paintings about Blackness or Black history so much as she is capturing those normal moments that are in no way race-based; in which Black people exist but in which they are rarely seen as present.

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There's an interesting interview from 2018 at Art Papers dot org  (HERE) with Sherald and the site's former editor and artistic director Victoria Camblin who "spoke with the artist about living and working in not-New-York, the power of being mainstream, and how making art is a damn job." 

One line that jumped out at me was this -- and I suspect you can guess why:

AS:  I don’t think I would be here talking to you if I had moved to New York (from Baltimore). I think a lot of the opportunities that came my way came because I was in a smaller city. I used to try to go to New York for every single opening, thinking that’s how I was going to make more connections. There was this one time at an opening when I saw that they had this hidden door camouflaged within a wall that I saw someone walk into. That’s where all the people that I needed to be talking to were, but I’m just out here scouring the place for nobody, and I’m a nobody, too. 

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I found a wonderful piece from the Art Institute of Chicago on the story behind Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama, HERE. 

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From April 2025, there is a very interesting article on "The Meteor" by Rebecca Carroll entitled "The Wonder of Amy Sherald, Ordinary Black life is extraordinary in the artist’s first major mid-career museum survey" (HERE). 

There's a very intriguing response from Sherald when asked by Carroll, "What happens next for you? Take a look at the artist's response  at that time -- back in early 2025:

"I’m hoping that this show will make it into the National Portrait Gallery without having to make any compromises based on who’s sitting in an office at the White House. And I don’t mean, 'Well, if I can’t have this painting of two men kissing and a trans person, then I’m not going to do the show.' I feel like that would be a mistake. I feel like it’s a mistake to step down from boards just because [Trump] wants to take over the Kennedy Center. Now more than ever, I feel like it’s important we be in those rooms and not shutting down the conversation. I think the bigger moment would be the work being in the Smithsonian Institution and people coming there to look at American history and Presidents, and then walking into my exhibition."

​4. CONCLUDING WORDS BY SHERALD & DICKINSON:

While her portraits are stylistically realistic, Sherald has described her approach as conceptual: “Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in that painting themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic. An archetype.”

Amy Sherald paints the truth.