 Good evening, and thank you for joining us tonight at our Brooklyn talk with Amy Sherrill, Hendy Wiley, and Doreen St. Felix. I'm excited to side with Johnne Garber-Rochelstein, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and the co-curator of the Brooklyn Museum's presentation of the Obama Portraits with Jane Deeney, and the W. Mellon, Senior Curator of American Art. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that we are currently located on land that is part of the unseated and sustainable movement of the Lenape Nations. We recognize and honor the Lenape Nations, their elders, and all future generations. At the Museum, we are committed toward addressing exclusions and erasures of Indigenous people in our collective work and confronting unknowing legacies of settler colonialism. Now for a few access notes. Kathleen Taylor and Candace Davider are interpreting today's talk. We have reserved seats in the front rows for anyone who would like a direct view of our ASL interpreters. It is my honor to welcome you today to today's conversations organized in conjunction with our special exhibition, The Obama Portraits. From the moment of their unveiling of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C. in February 2018, the official portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have become cultural icons. Ken DeWiley's portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherrill's portrait of the former First Lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public. Eugene? We're incredibly lucky tonight to have the two artists, Amy Sherrill and Ken DeWiley, here with us. They will be joined on stage with Doreen St. Felix, so I'll just take a moment for brief introductions. Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherrill documents contemporary African-American experience in the U.S. with her arresting and other worldly figurative paintings. Sherrill engages with the history of photography and portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives. She invites viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation and to situate Black heritage centrally in American art. Sherrill is native and Brooklyn-based artist Ken DeWiley has firmly situated himself within the European art historical tradition of monumental portrait painting. As a contemporary descendant of a long line of portraitists, including Titian, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and David, among others, Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of power in his representations of Black and Brown individuals throughout the world. Doreen St. Felix has been a staff writer at The New Yorkers since 2017 and was named the magazine's television critic in 2019. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in The Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, and in 2019, she won in the same category. After the conversation, there will be time for audience Q&A, so start thinking. And after the program, we'll be selling prints, t-shirts, and copies of the exhibition catalogs on stage. I think you can see a little table over there. There will be so much brilliance on the stage this evening, so please help us in welcoming Amy Sherrill, Ken DeWiley, and Doreen St. Felix. Hello everybody. Hello. Thank you everyone for coming. I'm Doreen, the moderator, and I'd like to start off with a fairly simple question. Both of you do portraiture, and I want to know what moved you to choose that as your practice? Well, I say that because I was born in 1973 and there was no computers. I grew up with Radio Shack, Tandy 2000, that my only exposure to painting or art really was painting. And so for me to become an artist meant that I had to learn how to render the figure in real life, because I had encyclopedias. I was like, you know, that was my looking at pictures of Leonardo and Michelangelo and whoever was in the encyclopedia. And I think maybe if I was born in 83 instead of 73, I don't know what I would be doing now, maybe something a little bit different. But I think because of the lack of technology, I had to start with, you know, I guess what we would consider rudimentary tools now like a pencil and paper. Remember those? I think you bring up, first off, it's just so good to see you. It's good to see you too. It's the first time seeing you so many times. I have a crush on Cahinde. What Amy brings up is the material fact of art, which is that it's this urge that for some reason we've been doing for thousands of years. Arguably one of our earliest urges. We go and we see these caves where people spend so much time in these dark, difficult places to find spaces to be alone and communicate something about who they are in this place. And the desire to be seen is pre-Cardassian. It's something that we see in the caves of Leicester. It's something that we see everywhere where we start to look at maybe the people that we didn't have time to look at to recognize that it doesn't take a Louvre, Saint-Trois-Pompidou to give you a sense of where all of the things that are important for a culture to arrive at. These places exist in our stories. They exist in the way that we raise our children and the values that we hand down. But I think painting occupies this very unique space because it's so just... You grind this rock down. You place your hand on a stone. And that's me. It's an instant form of portraiture that is immediately relatable and then the next kid wants to do it. And I'm sure there were zillions of them before but we all these years later have seen the ones that exist and the urge for me to become a portraitist is as old as time. Right. And I think we're talking about time in both the sense of, you know, 50 years but also time in memorial, thousands of years and that makes me wonder, you both have very intense relationships to photography and your work whenever I look at your renderings of figures I think about the way these portraits work in our age of mechanical reproduction. And so I'd love to just hear you talk about the way photography, especially in the case of the subjects that we're talking about today, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, some of the most photographed people around how that affected the way that you wanted to render those subjects and subjects in general. Well, I think I came to photography a little further into my studio practice as I, you know, embarked on this journey of like painting these figures in solitude. I was researching and looking for something and I found affirmation in photography and seeing myself represented through photography that I couldn't find in painting. So for me, that was when it kind of clicked for me and then it took me back to my childhood where I would, you know, on a rainy day, on a Sunday be in our family room and there was a cabinet where my mother kept all of our pictures and there was one picture of my grandmother Jewel. There was another photograph of my mother's father and his brother and mother and her husband and something about those photographs always captivated me, like just the quietness of them, the ability to, you know, become authors of our own narrative post the invention of the camera, the way that we represented ourselves, the way that we dressed up, the way that clothes played a role in our lives at that point in time. So I think that although my figures are gray and people usually relate that to black-and-white photography, it was an affirmation that I was moving in the right direction when I came across Du Bois' exhibition in Paris of photographs of the Giorgia Negro, which I saw, and me being from Georgia too, was especially touched by that and so I saw us, you know, trying to create a different narrative, something that was extricated from the dominant historical narrative, something that offered us a place to reimagine ourselves in a way and so that for me was my connection to photography. I am not a photographer. I do use a camera. But if you saw the pictures that I take for the paintings, you'd probably be like, no, that's not going to look good at all. But it, you know, it's, there's, for me, it's a way to build my connection to the subject and so as soon as I look into the viewfinder, that's when I start searching for the painting. So I don't make a sketch up or anything like that. We put on different clothes, you know, I take 40 or 50 pictures and then after a while the subject stops feeling like a subject and then that's when that kind of natural divine presence sets in and you're able to capture something really special that I think that the camera cannot capture, like the energy between the myself and the subject that kind of comes alive in the painting in a different way energetically than it would live in a photograph. That's interesting because when I was listening to you, I was thinking about, well, you took me on a journey which is basically like taking myself out of my own head and the way that I work and I think that's a really effective way. I think every person who makes paintings now have to deal with the same question. At what point is, at what point is a painting valuable as an object in the world? Okay, so clearly we had this conversation about there's the invention of the camera, so why make paintings anymore? People kept on making paintings. Why do we do it? There's something about the trace, something about your hand, its ability to make marks. We can all of us line up here and attempt to make a copy of a photograph or a copy of someone sitting in front of us and it'll never arrive the same painting moment whereas digital and or classic cameras will give you a consensus. And I think the lack of consensus is where we lie here. What we're really arriving at is a desire to get to something that's a bit more authentic. Photography is a tool. Does Barack Obama or Michelle Obama have the time to sit for 26 hours for us to sit day by day, one hour at a time, and do it the old classical way? No. So we use the photography as a way to get there but even before the presidential portraiture photographer for me was an opportunity. It was an opportunity to take something that has already been laid bare as a two-dimensional substrate and then to lay that even further bare by removing, diminishing certain colors, heightening others, taking textures that I love and the colors in there. The real question is what is the authentic item? Are you ever painting something that existed in the real world or are you painting something that is simply in your mind or perhaps but for the existence of this technology in your mind and these people who are in the streets who you happen to have met, all of these things arrive at this incredibly important, pregnant moment that we call the painting. By and large, what I try to do in my work is to find complete strangers, people minding their own business, trying to get to work every day and I just tap them on the shoulder and I say, listen, listen, I love the way you look. You've got something about it. You look at my books, look at what I've done before and it's in New York, it's in Mumbai, it's in Sao Paulo. Most people in big cities don't have the time of day. Most people say no and so what you end up with are an interesting subsection of people who say yes and those people are the ones who are perhaps a bit more open to the idea of seeing themselves in broad form, open to art, open to any number of things. I can't extrapolate that but in the end it's this interesting experiment that starts to take place and I think some aspect of that is in both Amy and my own work which is that we have certain ideas in mind but then we just allow the free range nature of the way that radical contingency comes up against us, like life just slams up against us and we say, okay, you and the next thing you know they're on the museum walls. What's so unique about this experience is that we're now talking about presidential portraiture which is a lot more demonstrative which is a lot more procedural historically but I'm getting out of myself. That's the perfect segue I feel like we planned this but I know that both of you rarely if ever take commissions and so to make a presidential portrait is to take in some ways the biggest commission that you might take in your career. To the scale of the ask challenge you did you feel that there was maybe an element of service that you had to complete in a way that you don't necessarily feel when you're painting of your own volition where you're choosing your own subject and making it part of your own canon? Well, I mean I always have to talk about the Hindi painting Michael Jackson first because I'm like after that I feel like you can dream to do anything so this was a big deal for me. It was also a big deal for him but he had already painted Michael Jackson so... You know it's... I forgot the question now What did you say? Basically it's a huge commission to do the portrait of a former first lady and the president how did you adjust from doing what you know how to do which is to... You honestly have to walk into this like it's... Your practice is what you do I think for a second I started to get ahead of myself and I'm like should I do this different should I do that different but I think she chose me to paint her because I do what I do and so I just stayed true to who I was in the process which meant a back and forth conversation with Meredith Cooper stylist trying to figure out how she wanted her how she wanted to represent her legacy with her attire and what she was wearing and we started out with eleven dresses narrowed it down to two and then we had a conversation about whether we wanted formal or casual and we decided to go casual and we met we had I like to photograph my models outside I like to rely on natural light and so we had to figure out a place to photograph her where we could have outside light but still be in private and we found this wonderfully um you know very green backyard in DC that was surrounded by bamboo so like we were back there and this is the house passed a million times going to Georgetown to go shopping and never paid attention to it um and so she showed up and um she showed up in the dress that you see in the painting at the time I had two dresses that I was going to try her in but then I realized that that was the dress like you said you rely on the moment to tell you what to do so I try not to plan too much um and she sat down and I had to figure out you know I didn't want to plan a pose either and uh I photographed her for about an hour and a half um the sun kept moving so we kept moving I had to pretend like I knew what I was doing the whole time like the first 15 pictures were like too dark but I'm like okay this is good this is good okay so now we're going to move over here we're going to find the right light and uh we ended up on the grass in some shade there was a lot of reflective light that was happening it was really beautiful um I found a stool for her to sit down in and the way that the dress kind of um laid itself out around her was beautiful and she looked like she was sitting atop a mountain it was just like just perfect and uh she's used to being photographed so I think she was really comfortable with with what was happening I was a little less comfortable because when I'm searching for that painting like I have to look her I'm looking at her soul you know what I mean so it's just this moment of like is this weird for you um and then you know she relaxed into this pose and I did a little directing with the fingers um I always say this because I think it's funny but when she had leaned forward the first time she was like this and then I said you know we can't do that because people don't think you're like like black power like secret black power you know stands or something like that so um I remember pulling her fingers out and she has really long beautiful fingers and and it just it just kind of happened but it was it was the moment that she just you know went into her you kind of become less aware of yourself and I think it was a really private intimate moment and I clicked the shutter and like I knew that was it even though I shot her a second time at a later date I knew at that moment that was the picture thank you so it's so interesting because I remember when Amy and I met you guys have to realize we were told to keep this thing stop top secret for a year and a half and an entire year and a half so imagine walking through the world just knowing and so we both locked eyes and she knew that I had the commission and we both sort of like had this moment of like finally we can sort of like give each other in conversation a little bit of this sort of like tense tense I don't think it's ever possible to just the the reason why both of these portraits are both so incredibly um of their time succinct and with this feeling of urgency is because this is our first black head of state in the most powerful nation in quotations in the world and so I am here now at the moment of conversation with Obama and I'm saying President I'd like to paint your portrait for these and these reasons you don't just get the gig you show up at the Oval Office and you have to go through the song and dance and I would love to know who the other artists are no one's telling me I know one okay we'll talk tell me after right and so as you may well know the people who aren't celebrated and Barack Obama says to me your work is about the powerless your work is about the people who are not seen etc what are you going to do with this situation I feel like I was in like an alcoholic blackock I don't remember what I said but I came out of there like the matrix of something towards the end it was all hugs and all backslaps and I knew that there was something different there was a lighter energy in the room and I knew that I got it I didn't get the official letter but you can tell when you do a great job interviewer would have you the question has to do not with photography rather with bring me back to what just how you I mean basically what Barack Obama asked you which is to say your work is about the powerless so how do you place the most powerful man in the world I was being a little bit hyperbolic about the whole alcoholic blackout part what I would say is this what I would say is that when confronted with that question I went immediately to the personal because portraits start where you are they start with the individual you're sitting here in front of I said my job is to be a steward of your story and as close to it as I can if you look at what the moves ultimately were with regards to his body language with regards to his dress even his attitude how the back sits in the chair all of these things are like hyper thought about you can think about it a lot you have to shoot thousands and thousands of shots he doesn't have all the time in the world so we're just constantly shooting and moving but the bottom line was that I wanted to have something that felt open what he wanted if I can put words into his mouth is that I want the world to know that I'm not just sitting up there separate from the people that I represent I want something that shows that I'm right here with the people that I represent and so there's a reason why his whole carriage is moving forward there's a whole reason why it's not in this sort of tight bound situation that you see in so many of those beautiful portraits of the past in the presidential halls sure it's the continuation of a story that we've heard before that we've seen before when you go to the great Smithsonian presidential hall white men by and large all and you'll see them following a very laid out tradition and so what I wanted to do was to break that glass in case of emergency this was the emergency the emergency was we need to figure out a new language for something that we've never dealt with before and I wanted to use his life story as the language I wanted to use his life story as the background the field when you look at those flowers behind him there's flowers that come from different episodes and chapters in his life we wanted to fracture break the glass and pick up little pieces and put them back up and so you've got Kenya in there and you've got Chicago and Hawaii and etc etc he is literally one of the most global people in terms of his spiritual sense his personal sense his political sense that urge I hoped to communicate in the painting and I hope I did you did the portrait, you know, as a unit I think of it as evidence of a social connection between the sitter and the painter and in both of your work I'm always so taken by the gaze of the subject who often feels like they're penetrating through the canvas to look directly at me and I was wondering how do you access or what is the work that you have to do in order to give materiality to this idea of an inner life I think what was so startling about the presidential portraits is that compared to what we normally see they looked like people as opposed to just symbols of the state and so I'm interested in what your practice or processes and understanding your subjects identities and how that is brought to the canvas and their gaze in particular one of the first things I did when you know after I got that phone call 30 minutes later I'm like let me get on the internet and I just looked at every single picture that had ever been taken of her and I was like I want to do the exact opposite of that you know but this painting is a representation of 21st century womanhood and it was important that I connect her to not only that but also a greater American story as well a black American story and so I think I think it's a little it was a little bit easier for me because you know as women we dress and our clothes are a huge expression of who we are and the one thing that drew me to the dress that Michelle Smith made was that the fabric that it was made from the print that was on the fabric reminded me of the G's been quotes from the G's been women in Alabama and that was a show I saw at the Whitney in 2008 yeah and I'm from Georgia even though you can't tell so Alabama was really close to my heart my mom's from Mobile and so that was that for me that really grounded her in American history and in black American history to be able to make that relation without it being too didactic a reference to art history and American history all wrapped up in one it was perfect and it made it really easy for me to place her in this iconic moment but also as she calls herself I think it's even on her Instagram page like she's a girl from the south side of Chicago like all of that had to be encompassed in this portrait and that's I don't know that's what I don't even know what I'm saying now that's what I wanted to do and that's what I did that's the conversation that we had and I think yeah I think for me it was really the dress that like sealed it for me in the story that I wanted to tell because had it been flowers it would have come off very different it would have been a different painting I almost forgot that we were there because there was something about the last part where you were talking about had it been flowers that had been okay so going back to what is fascinating about painting is that we we see something of ourselves we see something that's exciting that's not good enough okay so there's a difference between looking at a bowl of fruit looking at a landscape and looking at the portrait of someone that happens to be a human being as you get closer and closer to as you get closer and closer to people who look like you people who resonate your identity you start to feel as though this museum or this space is communicating something about me and the people I start to feel a sense of belonging so now we're talking not only about portraiture landscapes still us but we're talking about how these paintings fit in a social how they fit on the wall on the wall of the museum on the wall of the house where do they feel the best and so for so long I have been looking at really elegant piss elegant portraits and piss elegant landscapes the mechanical use of paint and thinner and wax and oils to create the illusion of life at its most celebrated and I figured at some point there must be some space left for me somewhere I can figure out how to make I've seen Goya's way of painting black people it's cute but it's not up to the occasion and you know David has gotten there all of the big boys from western art history have gotten there but I think it makes so much of a difference when we ourselves are the authors of our stories we don't say to Van Dyke well why is everyone in your paintings why I don't think he probably had the utterance happen day in his life I've had that happen to me a zillion times I'm sure you've heard this foolishness we're living now in an age in which we have the opportunity to tell our truths and to use the vocabulary that we inherit not only from west Africa and from the native peoples who were slaughtered here but also from Europe which by virtue of rape or desire is in a lot of our blood and so I belong to all of this and I I demand radically to have access to the code to be able to say let's reinvent painting right but it's it's not something that's easily taught you know the academies don't do it so much I think in favor of conceptual ideas and ideation we sort of leave the material practice of painting aside and I think that's a shame because there is something to be said about writing the great novel we'll use literature as an example how do you get there I don't know the mechanics of writing I think painting is the same way so not to be an old curmudgeon you young art students out there I'm simply saying that we need to learn the rules in order to break them and I think in terms of in terms of representation in terms of the type of portrait that I wanted to see on this occasion obviously we went into the rules and we knew that the rules were very staid and the fact of our being shattered every possible rule possible and so any utterance we made was ultimately going to give rise to something that was new under the sun and that's rare in the art world I went to the Alice Neal show at the Met over the summer and I saw this really beautiful portrait of two young black boys looking at their painter with consternation in their eyes it was really amazing and then later I read in the Times that they were able to find one of the subjects who is now in the 60's or 70's and there's an article explaining his reaction to looking at this painting and it made me wonder it really stuck in my mind do your subjects ever do you ever keep in touch with any of them have they ever expressed any reaction to seeing themselves as transformed by you I wonder if there's a sense of de-familiarization when they see the body that they've lived with for their entire lives processed by another eye it's just a curiosity that I had um the first time somebody asked me that question was a few years ago and that's when I realized how transactional my relationship with some of my models and I'm like I have to change that I mean I have some that I feel very connected to and one of them mostly if I'm photographing children so I have a few paintings that are preteen and some teenagers and those are really special to me and one little girl in particular her name was Morgan when I was living in Baltimore she was playing in Patterson Park and her brother was at football practice and I walked up to her when I saw her immediately I knew I wanted to paint her she had the perfect little face the perfect braids, the perfect little sundress and I walked up to her and I was like you know where's your mom and I said I have a question I want to ask her and I was chatting with her and asked her what her favorite subject was in school and she was like it's math and she said um and then they send me to another classroom for reading she's like because I read so well like I'm not really sure what else they can teach me or something like that she was just like everything I wanted to be you know and um so when she saw her portrait the beautiful thing about children is that they give you an honest response you know so she looked at it and she was like I think you got me I think you did a pretty good job you know and uh you know she literally didn't want to leave me so like um maybe I have a spirit of an angel but you know I met her I met her mom I went to the house and photographed her and then she ended up hanging out with me for the rest of the day and so we hung out and like you know just did stuff just did girl stuff um and then some people like it too much like I have some people that I'm like why did I paint you because they're like trying to order like a 10 foot by 10 foot post you know what I mean like I have one or two like that where I'm like man never again um but I think it's you know I think it's important and I think especially when they when they not not in a gallery setting so much but like when you walk into a museum and you get to see yourself on a wall like that you know within an institution that tells you um what to hold as valuable and you know it's like a container for history then I think it feels it feels different to them and I think it's um I don't know like they kind of blush at seeing themselves sometimes you know I think it's really special no no so I paint from photography I meet people randomly my process is basically I will um either go to the internet and put out some weird like words saying like this this this and this and start to create like an image type in my head which is kind of an interesting new thing um or I just take to the streets and I um go to mostly black and brown communities all over the world and just helicopter and not knowing anything about who I'm going to meet I'm going to bone up on you know histories as much as you can cultures as much as you can from a distance I think so much of what I'm doing is I'm kind of coming in there as black sure but also like a male cisgendered American who has a desire to sort of capture someone's image to create those luxury goods for wealthy consumers I mean if we're going to talk about what it is we are creating contemporary art about the black body and I existing one sure but what is this urge to constantly see myself refractured throughout the world I think it's I think it's complicated and beautiful but it's very difficult territory to talk about unless you're able to deal with subtlety so the adventure is this the 70s happen black shit goes crazy hip hop is everywhere we start recognizing that it is the leading edge of all of our culture we the Americans start to beam it out into the rest of the world young people from Tel Aviv to Sao Paulo to Colombo Sri Lanka are now fabricating new lives, new ideas, new selves based on this very American narrative my black ass wants to go out there and see it and I want to go out there and see it and record it in a way that they themselves have control over it they themselves decide how they position their bodies what are your local histories creating films about what the process is laying everything bare so that you the interested or uninterested or uninitiated viewer what is going on here what are all these reference points what is this flots on this jet because in so far as we say black and brown this and that so far as we try to look at different frontiers that exist on the peripheries of what has dominantly been consuming all the oxygen in the room when you really give a chance for someone to tell their own story personally that's it that's when the rubber hits the road the real question is are you ever affecting change if it's on such a small scale in such elite institutions in such diminished vocabulary compared to broader traditional media social media etc I don't think that shit I don't think those things matter I think that what really matters is a real true concerted effort and that all media of all types take what happens in present and past tense and discovers rediscovers recycles whatever so perhaps there's something that's not being consumed readily at the moment when it's being or maybe not seen as pression at the moment but I'm telling you when people tell and show up as their real selves and are given the permission to occupy their truths without interference there's something there the second question has to do with do you ever see them again no I don't I can't literally this desire to try to in this short life that I have see as many interesting places and stories if I if I made my life's goal becoming best friends with every subject I think that would undermine the broader superstructure and the superstructure is something that's like it sounds all fancy but it's basically the thing that makes me feel happy about getting up in the morning like answering new questions about what it feels like to be young, alive the desire to fashion oneself to be seen as beautiful to flirt and fall in love one day like that's all that stuff you see in pictures it's very romantic and we live in very unromantic times I love romantic shit I remember very vividly the day the portraits were unveiled I was watching it live and as soon as they pulled down those brown wraps I was like this is a moment I think we can all agree that no one has really historically cared about the presidential portraits before YouTube and at that day it was the biggest news story everyone was talking about it at the braiding shop at the supermarket and that's a very rare occurrence that people talk about art in that way and I have to ask what was your reaction to the reactions because the reactions were really strong Amy I think in particular people were really stunned by your use of color and it forced people to kind of deprogram the parts of the brain that are like what I see in the real world is what I should see in the art world and that was really phenomenal to watch Kehinde people are familiar with your work but I think that people were also stunned by how non-presidential Barak's pose looks in the portrait and so I'm curious to know were there any reactions that surprised you were you prepared for the avalanche of connection that people are still feeling I mean look at this room yeah yeah I think there was for me there was a little bit of a build up because I did once once it was leaked because it was leaked early I don't know one of the donors probably but I was getting letters already from like young people all over the country that were expressing their growing excitement for it and their desire to see someone like us make art because some of them wanted to be artists but didn't really understand what that meant or couldn't picture it something that they could actually do and make a living so that was really special to me to get these letters from high school students from kindergarteners from teachers that that was part of the build up and then afterwards I think that day was probably one of the most vulnerable days I've ever had in my whole life because you're having a portrait that literally the globe is invested in the outcome of and I don't know whether you felt that pressure but I was like you know it's something that was like a wonderful experience and you really have to have your wits about yourself because you know there's going to be criticism and I really honestly didn't think that there would be any criticism about what I paint in Grisai I don't think Michelle thought about that either because it's like that's the reason why she picked me but I thought it was wonderful and great that people were so tuned in and so willing to have a conversation and debate and some people were crying and happy and some people were angry because they felt like blackness wasn't represented and everybody has the right to feel the way that they want to feel I mean that's just what art is for if everybody liked it then something's probably really wrong with it and some people like their portrait or rhyme some people don't and so that's it was interesting I don't know I feel like I'm still recovering from that day honestly whenever the Porsche travel I feel like I go through this level of anxiety all over again whenever they land somewhere new being seen by new eyes and being taken in and processed but overall it was a really positive and wonderful experience and all I needed was what I got which was you know once you finish the portraits the board of commissioners or whatever they have to approve it and then they send it to they send it to Michelle and Barack and I got a text back that says you did it congratulations I love it so that's all I needed thank you listen I remember when Amy called me up after this thing can you mind if I quote you directly okay go she was like I hate the internet it's a horrible place it is a horrible place do you remember that? I never experienced trolls okay so that's fair but like are we really going to compare or proceed with the internet as our measurement gauge no what we're going to do is we're going to take a life's experience of looking an intuitive sense of what dignity and power is are you going to tell everybody else shut up I mean basically it wasn't made to be viewed seriously and you know for what it's worth everyone's got it they're like belly buttons we all have one right so we're all born with opinions we're all born with belly buttons I think that what we've got is a real high water mark with understanding skin I mean do you guys even know why is have you unpacked exactly what it is that you gave to these people I say this in quotations but what I'm saying is there's like this world that artists live in and then there's this world that the rest of us have to lead our everyday lives no one lives in some strange sort of mechanical world of painting but for a number of years those of us who are lucky enough to have an academic training in paintings we actually have to sort of go into our caves and we go off and we understand the mechanics of painting and the emotions surrounding them the wars and the countries that give rise to certain grand paintings but really rarely anyone ever been able to marry their own personal feelings and positions with all of that stuff that has to do with history and churches and states and governments and state craft well this stuff just showed up at our front door and now we're dealing with the consequences of dealing with a personal set of aesthetic choices as well as recognizing that there's a modern set of viewers a diverse set of viewers but like Amy said if the head of state or if the first lady says this is how I choose to be represented I don't care what you have to say because this is what they are choosing as their way of saying this was my period of time in this presidency period of time on this earth and I've spent my entire life getting to this moment I've chosen this young woman of this young man not as young to be the authors of my story that I think is really worthwhile the second thing has to do ultimately with the judge that you have inside of yourself so there was for me a lot of doubt with regards to am I able to make a painting with so much pressure I wanted to be able to have this sort of like running click click thing going on with cameras so as I'm painting there's like this but we did it in a way such that there was like a sound every few seconds and so there was every 15 seconds like this reminder like this is presidential, don't mess up and I think that ultimately more than the internet was such like a brain worm it really destabilized me so there are versions of the presidential portrait there's the one that went out and then there's the other ones that were like I want to thank you so much for talking with me tonight I want to ask one more question before we open it up to the audience for Q&A you can queue up at the microphones that you see in the aisle there it's started with a simple question we can end with a simple one what's going on now what's up next well I am working towards an exhibition in London in October 2022 what else I don't know like I basically wake up and walk my dogs I have three dogs August Wilson, George and Wheezy August Wilson and they keep George and Wheezy we a black family that's what my partner likes to say that's what Kevin said it's like oh George and Wheezy we're a black family and they keep us busy like we have three kids honestly I don't even know how I find time to paint because I'm picking up poop all the time I'm just living life I'm just trying to enjoy the fact that we're even having this conversation in person it's just really nice to be in the presence of people feel very lucky that I had a career that was able to sustain me within the pandemic I feel very blessed and you know I had enough to help my family or whoever needed something during that time and I'm just I'm two years from being 50 I have a lot going on in my head about that trying to be a grown-up paying taxes and stuff I've been doing a lot of work in Africa so during the pandemic when all this stuff was going down in New York I was in Senegal and and a bit in Nigeria as well so I've started up an organization called BlackRock BlackRock is you don't know BlackRock is an art residency program where artists from all over the country and all over the world open to black folks, brown folks, white folks, Asian folks whatever we want to be able to have Africa West Africa specifically we want to have West Africa as a center of excellence a site where people from all over the world can just kind of show up and create art together so what did I do? before any of this stuff was going on I got there and I started constructing a space that originally was just supposed to be my own painting space but then I started thinking broadly about like who would I want to be there and so very quickly it started to become something that we wanted to create a program surrounding right now we have three artists in residence every year it's modeled around the studio museum in Harlem I'm an alum of the studio museum in Harlem and thank you to Ken and Larry Stokesons and all of them this is something that I wanted to do because that's what you do if you raise right you take that space that gave you your lift and you create that new space for other people to get their lift right so the model is three at a time and I'm not the judge thank God can you imagine so we have great curators artists great filmmakers actors you name it people of good will they decide who the next artist will be and I provide new spaces we started in Senegal I'm now building in other West African countries I can't tell you too much but it's slowly I hope going to be this sort of aesthetic disease that just sort of passes through and so when you start thinking about the West Coast of Africa and about artistic excellence and we start to allow people to first hand live in these spaces that I have come to love and know and as opposed to just receiving them from like TV or the web or whatever it's so different being there and then like slowing down and actually making work and then that influencing your work and then there's like a whole community of people who've been through BlackRock before and you can share experience like it's basically a social movement but it's through the auspices or through the guise of an art project that's what I went up to good job thank you so much so I think we'll start with the right side and then we'll do the left side and then we'll do the right side thank you can you hear me good evening I want to thank you both for being the keepers of this spirit and lying yourselves to be used I myself never had any interest in going to the museum of portraiture in DC until your two portraits were there I looked at all of the portraits and I think JFK and George W had like a little different flow from everybody else's and then there were your portraits I don't care who does the next one but what I do is my question is no one really I think cares about who painted the other ones or the next one but your two names are going to be forever in history and do you both understand the magnitude of that like how are you living with that you know because again who did the others next one nobody cares but Amy Sherrill couldn't they why that's like a big deal I'm trying to live up to that it's a high watermark let's face it and it's bigger than I would like to think I am I think when you think about the presidency you think about the nation and the trappings of power and what a nation really is is about storytelling what a democracy is is about storytelling what capitalism is or money or human rights or any of these things that we tell ourselves it's about how much we really believe in it and as there's a reason why she doesn't care about the next portrait because we've decayed the story we've damaged the story and in so far as we think that stories are for kids that's just practice this is we have to stay in the habit of creating institutions that care about people and care about those of us who maybe aren't as lucky and fortunate I think that's the wise thing that she said which is that you should be aware of your position now because you're part of that story don't mess it up I heard you Hi I'm a New Yorker born and raised happy you are here today with us Ms. Cheryl I didn't know you before the portraits but I am adamantly going to follow you from here on end Mr. Kahinda Wiley I've been a fan of yours for quite a while and I wanted to realize something when I saw the portraits is that you usually hang your paintings low and eye level and when I was first drawn to you was because I've done inner city work with young people and and I also love reading comic books so when I saw your stuff I was attracted to seeing my community represented and in such a beautiful way sometimes in an adventurous way very romantic way but they were always hung low and then I thought this is forcing people to look at young black men in their eyes in their faces and I was really drawn to that I wonder with the Obama portrait when I saw it here it was a raised a little higher and I know you said that the lean in was a way for us to connect as equal people so will you continue to hang it this high or will you bring it back low again I'm curious it was actually supposed to be hung low but there was a curatorial decision made without me knowing because they wanted Michelle and Barack both to be eye level but I absolutely 100% prefer it to be hung low and by the time that I found out it was too late to change it I'm kidding I'm kidding but seriously that wasn't me I think it's really important that the work be hung low and I think it's really important that people be able to approach the painting as Michelle and Barack live in the world because they're very approachable people and they're very real and very human and so the affect of it being higher is I guess a misrepresentation of my vision How was it in was it different it was different that's a tough one because now it's now they're together it's a tough conversation for anyone whether it be a curator but ultimately your point of view should be the one that is there Thank you for your question though From DC here and I want to say I truly have never seen as many people lined up to see anything at the portrait gallery as your pieces so 100% they brought the people in and I think that's really important for changing the way museums are are engaging with the public what do you think museums should do based on the response to your portraits to get younger people in and to get more diverse populations in to see that the museums really are for them I mean they have to start showing more diverse artists I mean women artists artists of color just a more diverse you know selection of artists I mean I was talking to Doreen backstage and I was telling her about my experience of going getting into graduate school and how the second year graduates got to pick the cohort from the first year so we would look at all these slides and I was studying with Grace Hardigan at the time and we would do a blind selection at first and if we blindly picked it was always just seven white guys and so then we had to say okay well do we just want a Hoffberger school of painting program just full of white guys and so you know we had to make a conscious effort to bring some diversity into the program and I think museum institutions have to think about it in the same way and really represent the cities that they are in and educate the viewer and you know carry them along this art historical journey that we're taking on because we study art history we start with cave painting and we work our way up through figurative painting and then we have discussions about individualism and abstract expressionism and what all that means and how it relates to society and all these things are really important but I think when you think about art history and you think about the fact that black artists really weren't even given shows until the 1920s and 30s that weren't in the lobby of a YMCA that we've come very far but we still have a very long way to go when it comes to being represented on museum walls and in art history in general. I think also museums have to realize that whose paying the bills are the people who happen to be alive you know so much of what happens is there's entropy there's donors who gave quite a bit people who've had a sense of well this is what the past has meant here to for and so I'm endowing this chair to go on and forward the mission of this set of cultural expectations and points of view I think it takes an act of bravery and an act of realism to say that well we want this thing to continue into the 22nd century we want for the language of museum culture to continue to thrive and the trouble here is that we think about museums as being these sort of calcified institutions that stop at a certain point and they've always been changing they've constantly been moving regulating who they are based on who their audience base is in this experiment this accident this glorious accident that we call America we have a unique opportunity to be able to access the world itself all types of people as our audience base and to say what does a museum do now museums here to for have been in the job had a fiduciary responsibility to create our high watermarks as a society this is what we stand for as a people and if you don't do that then who else is going to do it museums are cultural institutions are the arbiters of truth when our media organizations can't when our family dinner table conversations can't we look towards culture as unifying our stories as saying that there's something for us to galvanize ourselves around and I think that in order for any of us to continue to have moments like this we need to continue having moments like this we need to continue having moments that say yes to people who happen to look not entirely like the other presidents on the wall and to be able to feel as though there's nothing wrong with being a young white guy in art school and having to compete in equal measure that's what it means to be properly in America if we want to live up to promises and I think that is what's exciting about seeing all these new voices on Instagram and on social media and stuff it's like there's so many of us in different parts of the world different types of bodies and different types of political realities and then can you imagine what it must be like to be a curator right now to be able to say like what is the world picture I remember at Yale we studied a class called the world picture and the organizing conceit was that these are the most important things to be seen and consumed and that's it I think the meal is much broader than the table I think we have time for just two more questions so we'll do this side and then over here thank you thank you I must say congratulations and a very excellent job done the portraits are very impressive and I would say you're one of the most important models for the young people black people people of all race to follow my question to you both is what message would you like to leave with a teenager who who dreams of being a successful artist and I'd appreciate a response from you both thank you well my first response is learn how to be comfortable with a young artist become comfortable with the idea of working for something that's not empirical be ready to hear a whole lot of knows before you hear a whole lot of yeses because they will come and I always say that just keep going like keep working go out and live in the world sometimes students that I've worked with say that they have like a creative block but I say you just haven't lived enough yet like you just need to live your way into the answers like Rilke says it's all out there and you just have to fill yourself up with enough life and things and that's what builds your visual vocabulary really it doesn't happen for me at least it didn't happen like sitting in my studio in a room I know for example the one year that I started painting again because I had stopped for a while to move back to Georgia for familial obligations and I didn't paint for the whole year but every day I got up I went to my studio I cried because nothing was happening and that year I learned how to sell and I I said sell sorry wait sale I learned how to sell a boat not sale that's the country coming out and I poured my heart into that because I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to be in this conversation having already studied artists like Kehinde and looking at artists like Hank Willis and you know these people that I'm fortunate to call my contemporaries now and realizing that it's less about luck than it is I think about strategy and being able to pay attention to how you can connect your narrative to an art historical narrative I think that's like the brilliance of Kehinde Wiley is exactly that and I think that's something that I think you know as artists we feel like we are supposed to wait to be found and I guess there is some truth to that because you just can't walk into a gallery and say I want to show my work with you but I think you know pay attention to the work that's being made in the world go to art fairs look at the climate try not to be repetitive I think it's really important that young black artists create in a way that's elevating us even higher and when I say that I mean that a lot of my students sometimes they'll learn about history they'll learn about American history and for example they'll learn about the brown paper bag test and then everybody makes work about that to like every year there's somebody that's like making work about that one point in time in history and so to learn how to carry that history with you and the weight of that history but bring it into modernity and put something out there that you can connect to that art historical narrative but it's still truly you and I think that's that's what I did that's how I found my voice was like if I'm sitting in a room with Cahinde, Hank McElene, Kara like who am I going to be in that room and then I realized that you know my story to tell is connected to my own narrative which was growing up in the south and the performative aspects of my identity and how that influenced who I was and it's just some, it developed it developed from there so connect your work to your own story I feel like the best work that I see that I love is always kind of connected to the artist's story in some way shape or form I think that's really important and yeah just don't quit because eventually you rise to the top because quitters, there's a lot of quitters in the world what do you tell okay so in order to tell someone how to deal with being an artist right now I'd be best equipped by knowing what circumstances they'd be facing like if they were going to school and I don't know what the hell is going on but like there's a whole different environment like when I first went to art school uhhhh I was 44 now so I was 1995 going into San Francisco San Francisco Art Institute looking at this sort of dying story of abstract expressionism and sort of hippie dumb and recognizing that capitalism has sort of strangely won and like Silicon Valley was moving in and the sort of like first steps of its grossness like high and ultimately what I decided was I'm going to have to just like hunker down and someone here is going to be brighter than I am and I'm going to be able to pick up some bricks and build some walls and perhaps there will be a foundation for something who knows all these years later after a few thumps and bumps I think that that was probably some pretty damn good advice to hunker down and try to figure out the mechanical ends towards the means and what I mean by that is just how to make stuff physically how to do printmaking how to do watercolor how to do oil painting how to work with acrylics how to use pretty much any medium that appeals to you personally and not only to know how to do it well but understand the history of it and understand the ends and out I think the material practice of painting is something that you can easily develop a love affair with and so much as one can love filmmaking and writing easily you can learn that the way that someone makes oil paint is just one way you can make that stuff in your own studio and grind that stuff yourself you can slowly create little universes that are so based on just the small technical aspects but they're so you that you don't even realize that you're starting to create your own vocabulary just by being yourself making your own thing and so by virtue of just being in your world and knowing your craft all you have to do next is to open your eyes and look at the world because that's really what your your call to arms is just to be as honest to yourself as possible about what it is that's in front of you and how it makes you feel you don't have any political imperative to make anything about blackness or womaness or gender this or any sort of political anything be your best little fabulous self and know what the fuck you're trying to do and how to and know how to do it well with grace the thing about me is that I also recognize the unfair aspects of the art industrial complex and how there's so many of us who are so incredibly talented but don't have the right connections or the right families or the right grades etc one of the things that I've noticed about New York City is that meritocracy it's tribal and so all of the folks that I was starting to hang out with up in Harlem when I first came to New York were people who who were part of the same emotional cultural intellectual temperature we were a tribe of young magicians up there and we took care of each other and there were certain people that we would make sure that we each other knew I would say to this prospective art student that they should try to find their tribe that they should try to get in there and perhaps not fit in because you know getting a bunch of artists together is like hurting cats there's there's you're not gonna find too much in the way of group think but with regards to charting out your own path do all the stuff that any young person would do check out all the work that's on the internet tons of stuff on the internet I recognize the difference between the taste in your mouth and the taste of everything else that enters it that's not me that's not me you drink water that's not you know who you are I always use the sort of like the baseline example of who I am as a person as that sort of simple like a sugar cube and I'm not that however I can appreciate it I can see its contours and its defining features so in the end learn the mechanical act of painting find your tribe and embrace the world as it is wholeheartedly I think also one more thing is recognize that your path is your path and don't compare yourself to other people because your time is your time and their time is their time and I think that's one thing that's hard to do when you see people rising and you're struggling and you're just trying to get there you have to recognize that your time is coming and just celebrate that person and their time and you focus on what your path is especially with a culture that is so obsessed with instant gratification and so much of what it means to be a great pianist and I'm glad we'll lift what did he say, something about 10,000 hours which is essentially equivalent to like 8 or 10 years of like active study and the idea that you would spend 10,000 hours doing anything it's kind of beautiful and not up to the occasion that we live in because there are so many distractions but I think that that ultimately is going to be something that you will almost kind of buoy you against comparing yourself there's something about being a really great concert pianist you know a really great concert pianist doesn't have to think about where their fingers are going they're not thinking about how to read the music they're thinking about how to emote and how to make themselves come across and so I do this like thought experiment myself sometimes like would they be comparing themselves to the emotion that someone else's life has given rise to the only wellspring that they have is the one that they have and I think that the key toward self-confidence comes from mastery you have to be able to know that this much I know is true otherwise you're just out here being like well there's so many shiny things that might lead to something whereas if you have worked so hard building the foundation of something that clearly has a path towards some sort of recognition that at least is some terra firma to hold on to the trouble now is that everything is just so disposable and that's the opposite of what an oil painting is about a portrait is about you'll never be younger than this again ever on this day I'm getting it down and it's going to last longer than your children will it's the opposite of this social media culture I think that's something that we should we should dance around yeah so our final question as someone who used to work here for a long time spent countless evenings in this auditorium I wanted first thank you for giving us the most beautiful, thoughtful and honest evening I can remember secondly I want to thank you both for giving such a great permanent gift to America and third I thought about this for a very long time I've always wondered what would happen if on the day you arrived to meet the Obamas they switched and you were both faced with painting someone who was not the person you thought it was going to be have you subsequently ever envisioned Amy with your portrait of Barack would look like and Candy with your portrait of Michelle would look like yeah that would be cool well when I went to the White House only Arnold Lehman can ask the question like that when I showed up at the White House I actually had a conversation with both of them so I was somehow under the impression that I was going to be painting Michelle but apparently Barack had questions for me too and the conversation started out with Michelle and I and we were going back and forth and then Barack was like well how would you paint me and I was like well and then Michelle was like it's not your time so the conversation never happened but I was like wow I don't know because I never thought about it I instantly attached myself to painting her but in my head I said I don't know and dad jeans like I was just you know but yeah I don't know I don't yeah I mean yours obviously would have been amazing of Michelle what would I like what would he have worn you know my question so if there were a switcheroo I would probably do what Amy did I would probably try to go personal but then also like you have to okay so there's different calculus for women in painting than men so in the world of painting women have been seen as possessions as objects to be consumed and or backdrop for powerful men so if you look at the 16th all the way into the 19th century French and British painting other colonial powers as well are all about showing off powerful big boys and what the stuff that they own looks like and rarely has it been a woman who occupies that space solidly and I don't see as this world and this country and this room rightly does not see Michelle that way because that's simply not her role her role is to be full forth full front full engaging I would probably have something that feels a little bit familiar from a portrait of a man but it probably would feel unfamiliar looking at an oil painting from from the past that way using the language of dominance and self acceptance and the language of taking up space quite luxuriously and feeling like I've been doing this for thousands of years that is what a state of grace in painting looks like I don't see why not would you have given her a sword I can't give you all that alright I think we have concluded this beautiful conversation thank you so much Amy thank you very much