CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2023

Amy Sherald, infusing the present and the future with hope

Featured spreads are from new release Amy Sherald: The World We Make, the first major monograph on the renowned portraitist, who has said that her eyes "search for people who are and who have the kind of light that provides the present and the future with hope." Certainly, after the monumental challenges of the past few years—in America, and around the world—more of this direct, recognizable kind of hope is what we want and need. In his essay, In Praise of Mere Beauty, Kevin Quashie takes the impact of Sherald's work further: "Amy Sherald’s work insists on mere beauty, a quiet, pulsing, just-there beauty. In advancing this phrase, I write in acknowledgment of Sherald’s artistic fineness, to praise her virtuosic skill as well as to gesture toward the sheer impact of encountering frame after frame of blackness: mere beauty as a proxy toward mere being, which has its own politic. Indeed, the very idea of mere beauty as idiom for viewing blackness responds to the world’s incapacity to appreciate blackness exactly that way. For me, a black viewer, there is something magical enacted in looking at this mere beauty, where I am saturated by seeing and not seeing myself, this process of abstracting and of multiplying that is at play in all art, even as the terms of antiblackness would seek to reduce black art—and black encounters with black art—to a lesser intelligence. Again, Amy Sherald’s aesthetic is one of mere beauty—a dynamic ordinary rendering of an approximation of a moment of life, a capable quality of light for such rendering, an invitation to try to behold blackness presented in such exquisite color."