amy sherald: a wonderful dream

moniquemeloche presents

A Wonderful Dream

Amy Sherald

Front cover image: Pupa, 2016 Oil on canvas 54 x 43 inches

Amy Sherald A Wonderful Dream

June 11 – August 27, 2016

This publication was created on the occasion of Amy Sherald’s first solo exhibition with moniquemeloche in summer 2016.

© 2016

Following her much lauded inclusion in our 2015 summer group show, Look At Me Now!,

moniquemeloche is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by our newest gallery

artist, Amy Sherald. In A Wonderful Dream, Sherald employs race to explore the evolution

of one’s identity as a reaction to external directives. Born in Georgia in 1973 and now

based in Baltimore, she credits her early years negotiating as a minority in a mostly white

community as a major influence on her practice. Inspired by artists such as Bo Bartlett,

Barkley Hendricks, and Kerry James Marshall, she paints dynamic portraits, designed to

divulge an erudite understanding of the psychological consequences of stereotyping and

racism.

Each portrait depicts a friend or acquaintance of the artist, suspended in vivid fashions

before a non-descript background, which Sherald describes as “the amorphous personal

space of my own existence within the context of black identity and my search for ways to

clarify and ground it.” To add to the otherworldliness, skin tone is rendered only in shades

of gray, made by mixing Naples yellow and black oil paint. Ever critical of African American

cultural history and the representation of black bodies, the series is Sherald’s satirical

manifestation of identities shaped by political, social, economic, and cultural influences.

Amy Sherald (American b. Columbus, GA 1973, lives Baltimore) received her MFA in Painting from

the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004), BA in Painting from Clark-Atlanta University (1997),

and was a Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence in Portobelo, Panama (1997). Sherald

is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting and Sculpture Grant (2014), a Pollock-Krasner

Foundation Grant (2013), and was the Juror’s Pick for New American Paintings Issue 88 (2010). Just

this year, Sherald was the first female to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition grand

prize, for which her work will be added to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Collection.

Along with her first solo exhibition in Chicago at moniquemeloche (2016), Sherald’s recent solo

shows include the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD (2013), Richard Demato Fine Arts, Sag

Harbor, NY (2011), and the University of North Carolina, Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill, NC

(2011). She’s exhibited in group shows at moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2015), US Embassy Dakar,

Senegal (2013), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2013), and will exhibit

this fall in Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of

Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (2016). Sherald’s work has been published in Transitions:

International Review, The International Review of African American Art, New American Paintings,

Hycide Magazine, Studio: Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, and the New York Times. Among her

many artist residencies, highlights include Tong Xion Art Center, Beijing, China (2008) and Odd

Nerdrum Private Study, Larvik, Norway (2005), and currently, Creative Art Alliance, Balitmore

(2016). Sherald’s work is in notable public collections, including the National Museum of Women in

the Arts, the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art and Culture, and the United States

Embassy, Dakar, Senegal.

Opposite:

Pilgrimage of the Chameleon, 2016 (detail)

A Wonderful Dream, 2016 Installation view

Previous: The Boy with the Big Fish, 2016 (detail)

Mother and Child, 2016 Oil on canvas

54 x 43 inches

The Make Believer (Monet’s Garden), 2016 Oil on canvas

54 x 43 inches

Being Themselves: The Portrait Paintings of Amy Sherald Essay by Dawoud Bey, June 2016

“My work began as an exploration to exclude the idea of color as race from my paintings

by removing “color” but still portraying racialized bodies as objects to be viewed through

portraiture.” –Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald’s paintings don’t just stay politely on the wall. They push into the viewers’

space, creating an experience that is both an experience of the painted object, but more

deeply, an intimate engagement with the subjects inhabiting her work. I say inhabiting

because of the palpable sense of physical presence with which she imbues them. The

fundamental trope in the making of portraiture is to create a psychological and emotional

experience of the depicted subject that is credible enough that the viewer then begins to

have an experience of the subject that in some ways transcends its quality as an object.

Through idiosyncratic gestural nuance, direction of the gaze, and something which might

be called “the fullness of human description,” we become almost involuntarily engaged.

Sherald brings all of these devices to bear on black bodies, which changes something, if

not everything. What changes are the ways that the history of the representation of black

subject in visual culture is equal to the heightened and fraught social narrative of race.

Here in the States, that narrative begins in the South, where the shape of that contentious

relationship between blacks and whites was first forged. The institution of slavery, with

its construct of the black body being solely a tool of forced labor and sexual exploitation

was of necessity subjected to a radical and necessary reworking when the institution of

slavery was abolished. But while the institution itself may have been abolished, the toxic

residue of misshapen racial relationships, and their forms of representations, continued.

Thus the visual representation of blacks has long been a field of considerable

contestation, since the social relations—whether subjugation or tragically diminished

human respect—were telegraphed to the larger public via their visual corollaries. And

thus the stereotypical images of blacks that pervaded the public arena for centuries, and

were meant to justify first slavery and later still racist intransigence and dismissal of black

autonomy, were created. These images were contradicted, of course, by the actual lived

experiences of black people as they knew themselves to be. But the portraits that

occupied black homes, on mantle places and nightstands, did not have a visible public

manifestation. If they had, the institutions that were buttressed by racism and a false

projection of black inferiority would have crumbled.

The Boy with the Big Fish, 2016 Oil on canvas

54 x 43 inches

Amy Sherald was born and raised in the south, a fact that is central to both her identity

and her work. As the original hotbed of America’s troubled and tangled crucible of black

and white relations, the south exacted a code of behavior from its black citizens that was

central to not only their very survival but also their sense of self. How to raise children in

that genteel environment of freighted and caustic racial paradox; children who were

secure in their own dignified sense of self, graceful in their own self-possession, but clear

about the contexts in which they must suppress that while wearing the mask of benign

and deferential obsequiousness? Once in the public arena, outside of the confines and

safety of the home, a clear sense of the differences between being oneself and being who

one needed to be in order to survive was crucial. So Sherald, as a daughter of the south,

grew up with an inherited and keen sense of the tension between the real and the

performative. Her paintings occupy a place of tension somewhere in between the two.

Sherald’s paintings are not based on a meticulous restatement of the facts; they are not

descended from the photo-realist tradition. They are rather her own inventions, based on

an actual person who she meets and photographs, yet not literally about that person. Met

in the course of various social interactions, these subjects are reinvented through the

material and conceptual frame of Sherald’s intentions. Isolated from any clear social

space, they are thus unmoored from the dictates of sociology and free to become

characters animated in Sherald’s own subjective retelling and reshaping of the black

subject. Often posed and holding objects whose meanings are largely allegorical, the

subjects have one foot in the real world and another in a space of Sherald’s own making.

While the resulting narratives and the absence of a literal skin color, along with the

heightened color palette applied to their garments and objects are meant to transport

the viewer to a place of the imagination, the exquisitely rendered idiosyncratic gestures

and knowingly described folds and drapes of their inhabited garments pull us into a space

of credible experience. The tension between these two entities—the imagined and the

illusionary real—sits at the center of Sherald’s rigorous practice as a painter. Whether in

the suggested heavy weight of the casually opened coat in Pilgrimage of the Chameleon,

2016 or the tilt of the head and placement of the hands in The Make Believer (Monet’s

Garden), 2016, Sherald understands and amplifies the devices of human presence and

behavior that enlivens the paintings, even as they implicate the viewer in a relationship

with the subjects of these paintings.

And the titles! Just as the gaze of the subjects toward the viewer implicates the viewer,

and catches some of those viewers in the uncomfortable web of their own suppositions,

the titles more fully call this out. So just what were you thinking as you viewed these

imaginary lavishly painted black figures who have become a very real presence on

Sherald’s canvasses? Depending on what you may be thinking, the titles should give you

pause and cause you to revisit the subject and their place in your imagination. Perhaps

the titles will give you cause to check yourself. Thus the titles are as much a part of the

conceptual construct of Sherald’s work as the painted figures themselves.

In the end, Amy Sherald’s subjects are simply being themselves, in all of their exquisitely

engaging and provocatively rendered ordinariness. But within the freighted firmament of

American social and aesthetic discourse, can black folks ever just simply be themselves,

without qualification? Without some dissonance? Amy Sherald’s arresting paintings keep

these questions reverberating, even as they keep us deeply and complexly engaged.

Previous: Mother and Child, 2016 (detail)

Contributor Biography

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that

were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He

has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago,

the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of

Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery

in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. The Walker Art Center

organized a mid-career survey of his work, “Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995,” that traveled to

institutions throughout the United States and Europe. The Renaissance Society at the University of

Chicago organized a survey exhibition in 2012 “Dawoud Bey: Picturing People” that traveled to

museums in the United States.

In addition to numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, Bey’s works are

included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both in the United States and abroad,

including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum,

the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Guggenheim Museum,

the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary

Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio

Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide.

He has been honored with numerous fellowships and honors over the course of his long career,

including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002) and a fellowship

from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991). He is currently a United States Artist Guthman

Fellow.

His critical writings have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States,

including High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967- 1975, The Van DerZee Studio, and David

Hammons: Been There Done That. He has curated a wide range of exhibitions at museums and

institutions as well, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago,

Weatherspoon Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Wadsworth

Atheneum, GASP (Gallery Artists Studio Projects) and the Hyde Park Art Center.

Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently

Professor of Art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught

since 1998. He is represented by Mary Boone Gallery, New York, Rena Bransten Gallery, San

Francisco, and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago. He juried the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait

Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, at which Amy Sherald was awarded first

prize.

Innocent You, Innocent Me, 2016 Oil on canvas 54 x 43 inches

Pupa, 2016 Oil on canvas

54 x 43 inches

Pilgrimage of the Chameleon, 2016 Oil on canvas

71 x 51 inches

AMY SHERALD American, b. Columbus, GA 1973 Lives and works in Baltimore, MD Education 2004 MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD 1997 BFA, Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA Solo Exhibitions 2017 new paintings, moniquemeloche LES, NY 2016 A Wonderful Dream, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL 2015 Off The Chain: American Art Unfettered, 2nd Street Gallery Charlottesville, VA 2013 Reginald F. Lewis Museum Baltimore, MD 2011 Richard Demato Fine Arts, Sag Harbor, NY

The Magical Real-ism of Amy Sherald, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill, NC Group Exhibitions 2016 Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; travels to Speed Museum Art Museum, Louisville, KY

Africa Forecast: Fashioning Contemporary Life, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA

Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today, Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.; travels to Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. 2015 Look At Me Now!, Curated by Allison Glenn, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL 2013 US Embassy Dakar, Senegal National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. 2012 Revealing the Presence of Africans in the European Renaissance, Galerie Myrtis, Baltimore, MD Mosaic Project Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, PA 2010 Gallery 101, Miami, FL Richard Demato Fine Art, Sag Harbor, NY 2008 Quasi-Painting, Randall Scott Gallery, Washington D.C. Urban Renaissance, Ramscale Penthouse, New York, New York 2005 Femme Effect, Sub-basement Gallery, Baltimore, MD 2004 Maryland Institute College of Art Thesis Exhibition, Baltimore, MD 2003 Earth Works, installation, The Labyrinth, Portobello, Panama Baltimore City Hall, Artscape, Baltimore, MD 2002 MFA First Year Candidate Group Show, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD Lipstick, City Hall of Atlanta Gallery, Atlanta, GA

Group Exhibitions continued 1999 Museum of Panama, collaboration with Dr. Arturo Lindsay, Panama City, Panama 1997 Museum of Panama Education Gallery, Panama City, Panama Selected Bibliography 2016 Lesser, Casey. “These 20 Female Artists Are Pushing Figurative Painting Forward”, Artsy, June 10.

Lam, Jenny. “10 art gallery exhibitions to see in June” Time Out Chicago, June 3.

Stafford Davis, Jessica. “10 Female Artists of Color on the Rise”, The Root, March 22.2016

O’Brien, Jane. “New faces in the US National Portrait Gallery”, BBC News, March 15. “Amy Sherald the first woman to win 2016 National Portrait Gallery Competition”, Black Art In America, March 12. 2015 Reichert, Elliot. “Review: Look at Me Now!/Monique Meloche Gallery”, Newcity, August 1. “’LOOK AT ME NOW’ AT MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY”, ARTNEWS, July 27.

“Off the Chain: American Art Unfettered”, Second Street Gallery, May 1. 2013 “Presence of Mind- Revealing Africans in the European Art”, Transitions: International Review, Issue 111. “Resisting Homogeneity in the 21st Century”, The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 24 No.2. “Portfolio - Life Stories”, Baltimore Style Magazine. Hycide Magazine, December (cover). 2011 “An Artist Perspective on Social Ascent”, Sag Harbor Express, May 26. “Studio Visits”, Urbanite Magazine, January Issue No. 79. 2010 American Art Collector, December Issue. New American Paintings Ed. 88. 2008 Studio, The Studio Museum of Harlem Magazine, Fall Issue. 2006 “In This Exhibition The Subject Is Women”, Baltimore Sun, February 22. 2004 “Under Busy Baltimore Streets Art Flourishes”, Baltimore Sun, October 24. 2003 “El Recuerdo de Una Feria”, La Prensa, June 1. “A Tale of Two Cities”, New York Times, June 30. Artist Residencies 2014-16 Creative Alliance Baltimore, Maryland 2012 Open Atelier, Amsterdam, Netherlands Art Rules Aruba Teaching Residency 2011 Art Rules Aruba Teaching Residency 2008 Tong Xion Art Center, Studio Assistant Resident, Beijing, China 2005 Odd Nerdrum Private Study 2003 Taller Portobello Artist Colony Portobello, Panama May 1997 Spelman College Art Colony Portobello, Panama 1996 Maine College of Art Portland, Maine

Awards and Grants 2016 Bethesda Painting Award Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2015 Semi- Finalist for Sondheim Artscape Prize 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptures Grant 2013 Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant Public Collections Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery United States Embassy Dakar, Senegal Smithsonian Museum of African American Art and Culture National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington D.C. FTI Technologies Inc., Baltimore, MD

Next page: Innocent You, Innocent Me, 2016 (detail)

moniquemeloche was founded in October 2000 with an inaugural exhibition titled

Homewrecker at Meloche’s home, and officially opened to the public in May 2001.

Working with an international group of emerging artists in all media, the gallery presents

conceptually challenging installations in Chicago and at art fairs internationally with an

emphasis on curatorial and institutional outreach.

moniquemeloche

2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60622

p 773.252.0299 www.moniquemeloche.com

amy sherald: a wonderful dream

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