Official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama arrive in LA on national tour

As part of a much-acclaimed nationwide tour, the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) beginning Nov. 7. The paintings are both historic and very much of the moment, heralded by the museum and others as iconic.

The Chicago Tribune describes the paintings of the former president and First Lady as “the most famous and far-reaching contemporary art works made in America this century.”

The LACMA exhibit is the only West Coast stop on a nationwide tour (including Chicago, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Houston,) originating from Washington’s Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery where the portraits were unveiled in February 2018.

“The Obama Portraits Tour” has also lifted the careers of artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald to new heights. Wiley and Sherald painted the portraits of President Obama and Mrs. Obama, respectively.

What accounts for the well-deserved hype? Encountering the portraits gives a rush of nostalgia for an administration that harks back to the “before” times (pre-pandemic and prior to our current divisions.)

The exhibition’s co-curators, Christine Y. Kim and Liz Andrews, attribute the interest to a number of factors, including the phenomenon of Obama’s presidency, the uniqueness of the paintings, and that the Obamas represent the attainment of excellence.

The portrait tour’s appeal also stems from the many “firsts” the art represents: This is the first time that two Black artists were commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to paint the official portraits of the president and First Lady.

The Obama paintings are also the first presidential portraits, safe to say, that have been consumed online by masses of people, as well as by the approximately 4 million who visited the paintings in Washington.

Sherald said in an email interview that exposure to the paintings that the tour brings is gratifying on many levels:

“I’m thrilled to have the portraits travel across the country to reach different audiences, particularly from an educational perspective,” she said. “Sitting with the works in their physical form is a unique experience entirely. I am hoping this tour will be an opportunity for reflection, through the portraits, on where we were, where we are, and where we are going as a country.”

The paintings deviate from the traditional staid portraiture depicting heads of state that has long characterized official portraits. The curators noted that while the National Portrait Gallery features portraits that all share a common trait, namely a powerful white male subject.

Both Wiley’s and Sherald’s body of work typically elevate “ordinary people” to iconic stature by virtue of painting them. The Obama commission flipped the script, challenging both to ground their famous subjects in an environment both authentic and fanciful.

“I wanted to capture Michelle in an intimate moment, to portray a part of her that we do not normally get to see as a public persona with obligations to so many people,” Sherald said. “This is no different from how I approach any subject for a painting: I want to show people as fully themselves, in their own individual stances, occupying space and time.”

Sherald’s Black subjects are painted with a muted gray skin tone and stare straight on. The choice of color for skin tone mirrors the way brown skin is rendered in black-and-white photography, according to the exhibit’s curators.

Asked if it weighs on her that these portraits may be future generations’ introductions to the Obamas, Sherald said she’s already pleased how the art is forging a connection:

“As a painter, I’m always invested in having my subjects reach out to people, to audiences who will be able to walk through a museum and see someone who looks like them, and particularly someone at the highest level of governance in this country.

“The necessity of having those experiences and of making those experiences possible was corroborated for me early on with Parker Curry, the little girl who came to the National Portrait Gallery to see the painting, and made this connection with it, with Michelle. Having those formative encounters with art and with representational imagery is so important, and something that continues to shape my work.”

(A 2018 photo of Curry, then 2, staring at Sherald’s painting in awe in the National Portrait Gallery became a viral sensation. Curry not only met (and danced with) Michelle Obama a few days later, but Curry and her mother collaborated on a children’s book, “Parker Looks Up,” released in 2019.)

For the portrait of Michelle Obama, Sherald captured the essence of the former First Lady: Cool, elegant, and majestically draped in a flowing dress, she appears at once approachable and guarded, floating in a flat powder blue space. Michelle Obama’s dress, designed by Michelle Smith, of the American brand Milly, pays tribute to the Gee’s Bend quilters, a group of women and their ancestors hailing from the hamlet along the Alabama River.

​”​The traditions of the Gee’s Bend quilting community have been on my mind for a long time, especially being from the South,” said Sherald, a native of Columbus, Ga. “Gee’s Bend is an amazing legacy of Black American women participating in a collective craft of making these beautiful objects, and of taking care of one another. I wanted to situate Mrs. Obama within a broader story of Black American image-making, thinking about the present by looking back on the past, and also towards the future.”

Kehinde Wiley, 44, rose to prominence by recasting his African American subjects (ranging from “man on the street” to celebrities) into gallant figures from Western art history. Growing up in South Los Angeles, his style developed in part as a reaction to classic 18th- and 19th-century portraiture — depicting regal white men — he viewed on trips to the Huntington Art Gallery’s collection. (Wiley’s reimagining of the famed Rococo painting “The Blue Boy” titled “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman” is on exhibit through Jan. 3 at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.)

Wiley’s depiction of Barack Obama frames the former president — dressed in a suit but no tie — in a lush backdrop. He sits in a chair (which Wiley has said is an “amalgamation” of chairs) surrounded by a cascade of greenery accented by flowers symbolizing the president’s roots. The painting’s background is adorned with chrysanthemums, the official flower of Chicago; white jasmine, emblematic of his home state of Hawaii; and African Blue Lilies, an ode to the homeland of the president’s late Kenyan father. The floral setting, perhaps more than any other aspect of the painting, gives the painting a feeling of an optical illusion.

“What I wanted to do was remove the landscape, sort of question its presence,” Wiley said during a virtual interview conducted by the Art Institute of Chicago in June. “And so once you have that void, the question is what do you fill that void with? I wanted to fill it with a personality of its own. I wanted the background to start to demand space of its own. I wanted it to feel as though it were alive, living.”

Running concurrently with “The Obama Portraits Tour” at LACMA is “Black American Portraits,” an exhibit which comprises about 150 works by more than 100 artists spanning the last two centuries, drawn primarily from LACMA’s collection. Sherald’s work “An Ocean Away” is featured along with works by artists including Charles Gaines, Sargent Deana Lawson, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, and Charles White.

LACMA will commemorate the opening of the two exhibitions with an open house featuring Sherald and Wiley’s artworks from 11.a.m. to 8 p.m. Nov. 7. This free event will include self-guided exhibition tours, art activities, and music in addition to “interactive floral fantasy photo booths” created by designer Maurice Harris of Bloom & Plume.

‘The Obama Potraits Tour’

When: “The Obama Portraits Tour” runs Nov. 7-Jan. 2; “Black American Portraits” will be exhibited Nov. 7-April 17. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays; 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays. Preview for museum members Nov. 4-6.

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Tickets: Advanced tickets required. For Los Angeles County residents, admission is $20 for adults, $16 for seniors and students and free for those under 18; for those who live outside L.A. County, admission is $25 for adults, $21 for seniors and students, $10 for teens (13-17) and youths (3-12); and free for those under 3. Admission is free for museum members.

Information: 323-857-6010, lacma.org