153
Amy Sherald
Hope is the thing with feathers (The little bird)
- Estimate
- $30,000 - 50,000
S. 45 1/4 x 37 in. (114.9 x 94 cm)
Further Details
“My eyes search for people who are and who have the kind of light that provides the present and the future with hope.”Teeming with the distinctive visual style that has made her one of America’s most preeminent portraitists, Amy Sherald’s screenprint Hope is the thing with feathers (The little bird) reinterprets her 2020 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.—Amy Sherald
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque in Grisaille, ca. 1824-34. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1938, 38.65.
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 Hope is the thing with feathers (The little bird), only the second print the artist ever published, Sherald identified such an energy in a young, female dancer she saw onstage at a performance by New York’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Wearing a burnt-orange dress patterned with a soaring bird, the print’s imagery and title evokes the first line of a 1891 verse by poet Emily Dickinson, positioning her youthful subject as a symbol of optimistic possibility.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the Gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I 've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Amy Sherald
AmericanAmy Sherald reflects on the contemporary African American experiences through her arresting and unearthly paintings. Her grisaille portraits call to the surface unexpected narratives and unfamiliar experiences of the every day, encouraging viewers to reconsider contemporary portrayals and accepted notions of race, representation, and the Black American experience.
Sherald’s paintings are at once vivid and unassuming, offering silent, unflinching meditations on contemporary lived experience. She renders her sitters in a grisaille tone to disarm preconceived notions and misconceptions of Black identity. Vibrant, mute, and surreal in the ordinariness they portray, her work offers the viewer silence for placid and direct reflection. Sherald’s work has been widely acclaimed as the artist was the first woman and the first African American to win the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 2019, the museum unveiled her official portrait of First Lady Michele Obama. Sherald’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA.