I celebrated my second Moderna shot on Friday by making my first visit to an art gallery in over a year. At Hauser & Wirth in DTLA Arts District, they have a showing of the portrait artist Amy Sherald, who was boosted into national prominence a few years ago with her commissioned official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. This show of five of her recent works is called The Great American Fact. Her distinctive style is a simplified realism, working in bold colors and clean simple shapes, reminiscent of Henri Rousseau, but focused on portraits of African-Americans in an idealized and iconographic visualization. Her works are striking, and not just because of their bold colors and monumental scale (approaching life size). It is her depiction of African-Americans at leisure inhabiting clothes, spaces, poses, and symbols that are traditionally white cultural property. The juxtaposition made me catch my breath and wonder: this is something I haven’t seen before, but why should it be so unexpected? The settings and symbols are classic Americana: Norman Rockwell-esque white picket fences and yellow clapboard houses, sunflowers, 1950s classic bicycles and cars, a James Dean style denim jacket, a Barbie pink outfit, a pink flamingo, a composition that calls to mind American Gothic. The relaxed poses have a natural feel that just adds to the subversiveness. And in another element of her signature style, skin tones are all rendered in grisaille, literally taking away the color of the skin, and creating an intriguing contrast with the strong colors used everywhere else. The picture of the surfers on the beach was particularly striking to me in the context of the recently resurfaced story of Bruce’s Beach, a thriving Black-owned beach resort in Manhattan Beach in the 1910s/1920s, one of the few places in southern California where Blacks could enjoy the beach at that time, which was run out of town with government sanction in a shameful example of racial injustice. Sherald says she paints the world she wants to see. Her scenes, including her beach, feel more like New England (it’s that Norman Rockwell vibe), and she may draw more positive inspiration from Martha’s Vineyard, which (unexpectedly to those unfamiliar with the history) does have a better example in Oak Bluffs, a town where African-Americans have historically owned, lived, and vacationed. Wherever their inspiration, I found her portraits visually appealing and thought-provoking.
They also had another exhibition, of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, which I was more mixed about. In one darkened gallery was a lone engaging abstract work called “Ttéia 1, C”, a composition of “silver thread, wood, nails, and light”. The silver threads are arranged in parallel floor-to-ceiling lines to create two diagonal columns that intersect each other. In the dark gallery, they are invisible except as spotlights catch them, so you only get glimpses of the overall form at any one time, and the visible portion shifts dynamically as you walk around it. It’s a beautiful visual, and it invites (or perhaps even compels) your interaction by walking all around it and raising and lowering your perspective to see how it changes. In the second gallery, there were a series of works all on the theme of the Tupinambá, an indigenous people of Brazil reputed to have been cannibals. The Tupinambá are represented in her work by red feathers, and the art pieces mostly comprised large balls covered mostly or entirely in red feathers. In some instances, there were single red-feathered balls with random body parts sticking out – a foot, a hand, or breasts – in poses that seemed not to be appendages of the spheres, but as remnants of what the people-eating spheres had consumed. A large installation comprised a large number of these spheres all together on top of a large tarp, with bits of bones sticking out of them. There were also a few spheres under the tarp, and those spheres were only partly or barely covered in red feathers, and otherwise dark. If you looked closer at the dark spheres under the tarp, they were covered with cockroaches, I suppose suggesting that the vibrant red cannibals were themselves ultimately going to become eaten by bugs. Interesting in concept, if not so visually appealing.
Fortunately, I didn’t view them in that order, the cannibals consumed by roaches weren’t the last thing I saw, and my appetite was intact to wander over to Salt & Straw to experience a different kind of art. At those masters of ice cream, I ventured to try a flavor made from Oregon Bartlett pears with blue cheese. It was excellent. The pear flavor really came through in the ice cream, with goodly sized chunks of pear in it, and occasional small bits of blue cheese, just enough for accent but not overpowering the more subtle pear flavor.
