The National Portrait Gallery's Obama Portraits Will Embark on a Five-City Tour
Barack and Michelle Obama will soon be on the move once more, only this time, their campaign trail is more artistic than political—and it conspicuously lacks a third dimension.
We’re talking, of course, about the power couple’s portraits, which are set to embark on a five-city tour between June 2021 and May 2022. As the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced this week, the dynamic duo—painted by artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald—will leave their homes on the museum’s walls next May before journeying to the Art Institute of Chicago the following month. The yearlong sojourn will then take the paintings to the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston before concluding on May 30, 2022.
Since making their Portrait Gallery debut in 2018, Wiley and Sherald’s likenesses of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, respectively, have drawn patrons by the thousands. Their first year on display effectively doubled attendance to more than two million, says Dorothy Moss, the gallery’s curator of painting and sculpture. The portraits, she explains, have been “transformative” for the museum.
For some, visiting the paintings is something of a “pilgrimage,” Sherald, the artist behind the former first lady’s painting and a winner of Smithsonian magazine’s American Ingenuity Awards, tells Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times. Sherald and Wiley are the first African American artists commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to immortalize a presidential pair in paint.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/national-portrait-gallerys-obama-portraits-depart-five-city-tour-180974045/
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