Philadelphia proves that no executive order can stop the arts, or our courage

Art-lovers in the nation’s capital won’t get a chance to admire For love, and for country, Sherald’s exuberant take on Alfred Eisenstaedt’s black-and-white photograph, V-J Day in Times Square, in which a sailor envelops a woman in a back-bending kiss. Sherald’s portrait queers the pose by subbing in two Black men in uniform.

And visitors to the National Portrait Gallery, where Sherald’s traveling exhibition American Sublime would have been the first solo show at the gallery by a Black contemporary artist, definitely will not see Trans Forming Liberty, a regal-looking trans woman—broad-shouldered, barefoot, with hair of Day-Glo pink, blue gown slit fashionably up one thigh—hoisting Lady Liberty’s signature torch abloom with flowers.

That image stopped the show. Literally.

“A culture of censorship”

American Sublime, first shown at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, then at the Whitney Museum in New York, was scheduled to open Friday, September 19, at the National Portrait Gallery.

But this summer, museum leaders got twitchy about Trans Forming Liberty, afraid it would raise the hackles and recrimination of President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his attacks on the whole Smithsonian complex and its “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

There are two versions of what happened next. In Sherald’s account, the Portrait Gallery wanted to swap out the painting for a video “contextualizing” the piece, and Sherald said no because that video included anti-trans viewpoints. The museum says she misunderstood; their intention was to show the painting along with the video.

That all became moot when Sherald cancelled the show, saying that she could not “in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship, especially when it targets vulnerable communities.”

Our tangled story

Who really loses here? Not Sherald, because she’s already catapulted to prominence with her bold, intimate portraits of ordinary and well-known Black people—including the very-well-known Michelle Obama, whose official portrait, a Sherald commission, hangs in the Portrait Gallery.

Anyway, Sherald has found another venue for American Sublime—the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it will open on Sunday, November 2.

No, the folks who really got robbed are the residents of Washington, DC, a city of 702,000, 45 percent of them Black, and the millions of visitors who pilgrimage to the Smithsonian each year, from across the US and abroad, to learn something about the tangled story of this country.

That story’s artifacts include the Apollo 11 command module at the Air and Space Museum and an “Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride flag” flying at the entrance to the National Museum of American History, the chiffon gowns of former First Ladies, along with the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter that was the locus of Civil Rights sit-ins.

Remaking the catalog of American icons

Trump and his posse of American triumphalists want to sanitize a national history that has always—from its founding papas and their calligraphed parchments—been a messy, complicated snare of liberation and oppression, democracy and demagogues.

And they want to erase the people Sherald’s work makes visible, folks who have historically been left out of the catalogue of American icons. Sherald paints Black people—male, female, queer, trans, old, younger—in large-scale portraits, usually minus contextual details, against backgrounds of a single, bright color.

Only the clothing—often fabulous, sometimes homespun—offers clues about the wearer. The faces are full-frontal, the eyes open, the vibe direct, disarmed, confrontational, confident. The images seem to be saying, “Here I am. I’m looking at you. Now look at me.”

I saw American Sublime at the Whitney two days before it closed, on a jewel of a summer Friday evening when that museum is free to anyone with the patience to stand in line. In Sherald’s work, I saw people who reminded me of my grade-school classmates, my neighbors, my own grandmothers.

It’s an enormous loss that visitors to the Portrait Gallery—two million of them each year—won’t have the opportunity to find those resonances. Instead, they’ll have to drive 44 miles to Baltimore and pony up $10 to see the exhibit there.

Or they can make a day trip to Philadelphia, to the open-air, free-to-all museum that is our city’s Mural Arts Program (MAP).

“I got this. I’m here.”

When I guide groups of locals and visitors on MAP’s “Mural Mile” walking tour, we start with Declaration at 150 North Broad Street: a redacted copy of the Declaration of Independence superimposed over the face of a young woman.

I ask folks in my groups to describe the woman’s expression; they say things like, “Sad. Cynical. Hopeless. Tired.” We talk about words penned 250 years ago that are hard to swallow now; we talk about what the Declaration left out.

Ninety minutes later, we wind up in a parking lot on Sansom Street between 11th and 12th Streets, facing east, to examine The Promise of Biotechnology. Then I ask them to turn 180 degrees.

“Ohhh … Oh, my … Whoa … Wow.”

They are gaping at Sherald’s portrait, six stories high, of a young woman in a stunning black-and-white jacket and a yellow cloche hat. The model is Najee Spencer-Young, who grew up in North Philly and was among a group of students who visited Sherald’s studio and learned about her artistic process.

“How would you describe her expression?” I ask. “Confident,” someone says. “Proud. Daring. Like, ‘I got this. I’m here.’”

Draw your own conclusions

Trump can give museum curators—and university presidents and spineless members of Congress—the heebie-jeebies. He can call them Communists, accuse them of antisemitism, threaten their jobs, and strip their funding.

But he can’t use an executive order to halt art or imagination, irony or courage. He can’t tame the power of a portrait to disrupt complacency or to poke at questions about whose images loom over our consciousness, who gets to be larger than life.

You don’t need a ticket or a presidential nod of approval. Get yourself to Sansom Street. Look up. Linger. Draw your own conclusions about who and what is American, or free, or sublime.