Tour of Michelle and Barack Obama portraits extended to two more cities
It has been eight months since the portraits of former president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald left Washington for a year-long cross-country tour. Now the tour has been extended, and the paintings won’t be coming back to the National Portrait Gallery until November.
The gallery announced Wednesday that two more stops have been added to the popular tour — the de Young Museum in San Francisco (June 18 to Aug. 14) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Sept. 3 to Oct. 30).
The announcement comes while the portraits are on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Sherald’s home state, through March 20. It’s the third stop on a journey that began in the Obamas’ hometown of Chicago last summer and has drawn large crowds and stirred emotions. The tour also set up in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Wiley’s hometown. After Atlanta, the portraits will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (April 3 to May 30).
Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery, said the decision to extend the tour aligned with the Smithsonian’s national vision.
“I really do want to get outside of the D.C., Maryland and Virginia bubble and make sure that people recognize we’re really trying to serve as many people across the country as we can,” she said. “We know these communities are really going to celebrate them.”
Angelica Luma took her 7-year-old son and two of his friends to see the portraits in Atlanta. “Kelson Jr. seeing people who look like him being depicted in a dignified way, by Black artists who also look like him, in a place like the High Museum is priceless,” Luma wrote in an email. The experience, she added, “validates his worth, his concept of his possibilities, and his place in the world as a young Black male.”
Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young, noted the groundbreaking nature of the portraits, which mark the first time a Smithsonian museum has commissioned Black artists for its portraits of a president and first lady.
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Wiley and Sherald, he said, “work within the genre of Western portraiture painting, while actively expanding, and critiquing, artistic conventions that have traditionally defined representations of power. We are thrilled that Bay Area audiences will have the opportunity to experience these powerful, iconic paintings in person.”
At their final stop in Boston, the portraits will be displayed with a collection that reflects the city’s history of formal portraiture, dating back to the founding of the nation, said Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Museum of Fine Arts.
“Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald are visionary artists whose paintings both pay homage to and reimagine the centuries-old tradition of American portraiture,” he said. “It is an honor for us to host the Obama portraits at the MFA.”
Sherald is known for her grayscale Black portraiture, meant to subvert the idea of “color as race.” Her Michelle Obama portrait shows the former first lady wearing a gown reminiscent of Gee’s Bend quilts. Wiley uses the aesthetics of the Old Masters to elevate Black figures. In his portrait of the former president, Obama is surrounded by vibrant foliage and flowers representing Chicago, his birthplace of Hawaii and his Kenyan roots.
Unveiled in February 2018, the Obama portraits attracted record-breaking crowds (the National Portrait Gallery reported 2.3 million visitors in 2018, 1 million more than in 2017) and brought stories of visitors breaking down into tears.
Gallery director Sajet points to the museum’s roles in bringing people together.
“As much as you can see those portraits virtually, it doesn’t replace the fact of not just seeing them in person, but seeing them in person with other people,” she said. “There’s this sense of community, and that’s the thing that I really have taken away from all of this.”
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