When filmmaker Christine Turner got a call from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) when asked if she would be willing to make a film about the painters Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, she did not hesitate to say yes. She had followed the work of both artists for several years, once she even went to see Sherald’s work in New York when she was nine months pregnant. And she knew that the only way to show Wiley and Sherald in all their glory, she told me, was to “provide them the same reverence, dignity and respect” that they accord their own models. The final product, “Paint & Pitchfork,” explores the unfinished legacies of two black cultural icons and how, by painting themselves, their subjects, and their people into the art-historical record, they attempt to rectify the social and cultural absence of, as Wiley says, in the film, “people who look like me.”
Wiley speaks of her upbringing in South Central Los Angeles as a time when her art flourished and her family ties deepened, even in the face of poverty. In the documentary, photos from those years appear on the screen, accompanied by the instruments that feed the jazz soundtrack: drumbeats introduce the image of a young Wiley with a Basquiat-style head of hair; the metal bars of a vibraphone give way to the adult artist photographed among a sea of smiling relatives, all dressed in colorful clothing and embracing each other. Turner shows the lush, intricate backgrounds of Wiley’s large-scale paintings before focusing on the precise details: his palette, his brushstrokes, the areas of the canvas he meticulously colors. Wiley explains his intense attraction to the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. 19th-century masters like Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, and towards contemporary masters of more figurative art, including Charles White and Kerry James Marshall; Partly due to that mixture of influences, Wiley determined that his style was going to be very stately and very black. “I would look at that,” he says, referring to the great European portraits, “and get into it.”
The film then turns to Sherald, who appears dressed in denim from head to toe, with her collar open and her corkscrew curls brushing. Her roots are in the American South and she explains how the conservatism of her hometown of Columbus, Georgia became the model of what not to emulate in her life and art. The horns sound throughout a progression of Sherald’s childhood photos, and we see the striking color schemes of her art reflected in her clothing, as if that’s when she had begun to develop the her style. “I did a painting, where I found this young girl who lived outside the box. I realized that’s the kind of person I’m looking for,” says Sherald. “These are the people who need to be represented in art history and on the walls of institutions. These are the people who need to look at something and find their humanity within it, because sometimes it’s impossible to find anywhere else.”
The artists’ timelines converged when they received life-changing commissions from the National Portrait Gallery to immortalize the Obamas. Wiley’s work tends to frame black men with metaphorical flowers and other patterns. In his portrait of Barack Obama, Wiley added botanical representations from the former president’s past, including flowers from Hawaii, Illinois and Kenya, reaching out from his curtains of leaves to embrace the stoic sitter. Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama is typical of the artist’s color-block style, which emphasizes the majesty of the former First Lady’s bearing.
Both portraits commemorate their subjects, though no more than the artists intend to do for every other black person they portray. What unites their work is that it is a direct address to a representational void: they use their medium to say “yes” to black humanity when history says “no.” “The question I’ve often been asked is, ‘Will you ever paint someone who isn’t black people?’ My answer is ‘No, I won’t,’” says Sherald. “I’m here to paint my own ideal and represent it to the world, and if I can’t do that, then something is seriously wrong.” He adds, as a final note on the film: “You should look at a history book and then see if you want to ask me that question, because the problem is that you recognize an absence of yourself, but you don’t recognize an absence of me.”