In Amy Sherald’s 2011 portrait, Madame Noire, a Black woman in a blonde wig stares imperiously down at the viewer. Dressed in the costume of the “droogs” from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, Sherald’s model subverts hegemonic narratives of class, sexuality, and respectability for Black women.

 

Madame Noire is an early example of the key stylistic elements that make up Sherald’s œuvre of portraiture. Her model, likely sourced on the streets of Baltimore, stands against a mottled red background, with subtle variation in texture built up in the method of her mentor, Grace Hartigan, a lengthy process in which she drips paint and turpentine on the canvas and lets the pigment “do what it do.”ⁱ The model’s skin is rendered in grisaille, using the artist’s signature combination of black and Naples yellow. Though she originally used this color combination for her model’s skin due to an aesthetic preference, her greyscale filter for Black skin has become the symbolic hallmark of her work. “Even if I painted them purple, they’d still be Black people,” she has said.ⁱⁱ By sidestepping realistic rendering of skin tones, Sherald can move her work past surface-level perceptions of racial difference, into a wider conversation of racial representation and what it means, culturally, to be Black.
"When I first began to paint these portraits, I was really interested in portraying a more fantastical narrative, so costuming was a way for me to engage the idea of creating an alternate narrative extricated from the dominant historical narrative. Creating archetypes break away from this and allow for a space of reimagining."
—Amy Sherald The costumes of Sherald’s models are just as significant as their greyscaled skintones. In Madame Noire, the model is dressed like the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, Alex DeLarge, and his gang of miscreants, the droogs. As Elena Lazic writes for the British Film Institute, Milena Canonero’s costume design for this film is an “eerily timeless” engagement with the film’s themes of class, money, and power. The bowler hat, wooden cane, and cricket codpiece are symbolic of an elite lifestyle, but on the working-class body of DeLarge, these accessories become “a mockery of the fair play, elegance, and integrity of the class they are associated with.”ⁱⁱⁱ Furthermore, DeLarge’s upper-class accessories become weapons, as he uses his cane to attack people in the film, and the sexually provocative codpiece functions as a form of armor.

By dressing her model in this costume, Sherald encourages her viewer to seek out similar subversions of class and sexuality in Madame Noire. The title of the work provides three overlapping courses of interpretation. Madame Noire could be a reference to Black lifestyle media brand, MadameNoire; to Madam C.J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire; or, perhaps, to historical Black sex workers, particularly, brothel owners, or madams.

 

 

Most directly, MadameNoire is also the name of a digital Black lifestyle magazine founded in 2010, the year before Sherald made the present work, that brands itself as a “daily source of news and inspiration for smart, stylish Black women.”^iv MadameNoire both empowers Black women and subverts racist stereotypes by asserting that they are smart and stylish. Yet at the same time, the magazine’s word choices of “smart” and “stylish” recall the pervasiveness of respectability politics in the Black community. 

Respectability is a term historians use to describe how Black people (and specifically, Black women) have distanced themselves from racist stereotypes since the late 1800s to gain acceptance in wider society.^v As social justice writer Odochi Ibe explains, the pursuit of respectability comes in many forms; some efforts, such as increasing literacy or access to employment, generally improve one’s quality of life, while others, such as conforming one’s appearance to white beauty standards, can be a source of stress. While respectability can be empowering for some, it can be disempowering for others, as it limits what Blackness is, and how one can be Black.^vi 

 

A classic success story for respectability comes in the life of Madam C.J. Walker, a Black businesswoman and philanthropist who was the first self-made female millionaire in the United States. In the 1910s, Walker made her fortune in cosmetics and haircare products marketed towards Black women. In addition to supplying products that filled a need that the white beauty industry ignored, Walker provided jobs and training for hundreds of thousands of young Black women through the Walker Beauty School. 

 

At a time when empowering, respectful work was hard to come by, Madam C.J. Walker’s business had a real impact on the everyday lives of the women she employed. Through work with Madam C.J. Walker, young Black women could define their identities on their own terms, and refashion a narrative of Black womanhood beyond stereotypes. Sherald does the same in her work, using costumes and props to call our racial presumptions into question, and offer alternative histories.

"Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented."
—Amy Sherald

Just as Madame Noire invokes Madam C.J. Walker, she also invokes another kind of madam: a brothel owner. Her bowler hat and cane doubly reference A Clockwork Orange and the stereotypical outfit of a pimp; the codpiece provocatively draws the eye towards her pelvis. Sex work, while not considered “respectable,” has historically been another path for women, especially women of color, to take agency over their own lives and become financially independent.

 

While Madam C.J. Walker made her fortune in cosmetics and haircare, madam Vina Fields made hers as a brothel owner. Active from the 1870s to the 1910s, Vina Fields began her career with eight workers and a servant; she was the only Black madam in Chicago with a servant, which was an early sign of her success.^vii By the height of her career, she directed sixty workers and was one of the wealthiest Black people in Chicago.^viii Like Madam C.J. Walker, she used her fortune to care for her family and to help other Black women provide for their loved ones as well.

The character of Madame Noire crosses and recrosses the line between respectable and illicit Black femininity. She is both real and fantastic, a symbolically rich example of Sherald’s signature portrait style. Madame Noire “embodies the depth and weight of black history, along with an aesthetic of re-imagination or self-fashioning of that history.”^ix

ⁱ Amy Sherald, quoted in Marlisa Sanders, “Amy Sherald, A Second Life,” The International Review of African American Art, 2013, online.
ⁱⁱ Amy Sherald, in conversation with Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, Talk Art [podcast], September 27, 2022, 27:18.
ⁱⁱⁱ Elena Lazic, “A Clockwork Orange and Fashion: Why The Droogs Never Go Out of Style,” The British Film Institute, April 2, 2019, online.
^iv MadameNoire, “About MadameNoire,” accessed October 6, 2022, online.
^v Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, Harvard University Press, 1993, online. 
^vi Odochi Ibe, “Playing the Game of Respectability Politics, But At What Cost?” verywellmind, February 15, 2022, online.
^vii Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got To Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010. 
^viii Ibid.
^ix Amy Sherald, quoted in Elaine Sexton, “Making Mirrors: A Micro-Interview with Amy Sherald,” Tulepo Quarterly, October 14, 2016, online.