“My eyes search for people who are and who have the kind of light that provides the present and the future with hope.”

—Amy Sherald

Teeming with the distinctive visual style that has made her one of America’s most preeminent portraitists, Amy Sherald’s screenprint Handsome reinterprets her 2019 oil painting of the same name. As the first African American woman to receive a presidential portrait commission from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. – when she depicted former First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018– Sherald’s unconventional approach to portraiture presents Black subjects with their skin rendered in grisaille, a marked choice meant to divert focus away from the sitter’s race and towards their humanity, their inner life. With their skin tones neutralized in grey, her subjects stand most often with a casual pose and assertive gaze, positioned against a single-color backdrop, creating a universalizing, placeless scene for her figures to inhabit.

For the sitters of her carefully detailed and lifelike renderings, Sherald draws her gaze toward people that she primarily encounters by happenstance, whether while shopping at the grocery store, walking down the street, or through the casual introduction of a friend. In these figures, Sherald notices a spark, a certain je ne sais quoi. “When I choose my models,” the artist elucidated, “it’s something that only I can see in that person, in their face and their eyes, that’s so captivating about them.” With Handsome, the first print the artist ever published, Sherald identified such an energy in Jamar Roberts, who was at the time the Resident Choreographer for New York’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Wearing a loose-fitting, navy blue polka dotted shirt and white pants, Roberts, whom Sherald met through her assistant, exudes a reserved, yet self-assured presence. Such demeanor reflects Roberts’ confidently poised work as a choreographer, notably evident in his 2019 performance titled Cooped, which was inspired by statistics showing the disproportionate amount of black and brown bodies being affected by the Covid-19 crisis.  

 
As Roberts noted of the performance, “I set out to create an imaginatively potent fever dream that aims to capture the fear of sickness, and the anxiety of quarantine as it relates to the historical trauma of black bodies being relegated to live in and within confined spaces. Being asked to self-quarantine while politically quarantined presents a crisis within a crisis, leaving these communities the most exposed and vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic […] This display of the dancing black body not only peers into the psyche of marginalized people in a very specific crisis, but it is also a testament to their strength, beauty and resilience.” In response, The New York Times reviewed Cooped with utmost praise, calling it “one of the most powerful artistic responses yet to the COVID-19 crisis. And as that crisis changes shape, as the anxiety over disease and confinement is compounded by violence and protest, the resonance of the work only expands.”