Some people have argued that Michelle’s portrait doesn’t really look like her. From a genre standpoint, how much do portraits really need to look like their subjects?
I’m going to start off with the famous quote from Gertrude Stein, whose portrait was painted by Pablo Picasso at the beginning of the 20th century and people said it doesn’t look like you. And she said, “Don’t worry, it will soon.” I would say the same thing with this portrait, that while people were looking for a photographic likeness, that’s not what Amy does, so I think when you look at the gesture, when you look at the pose, when you feel the whole coolness of the piece, to me that is Michelle Obama. I think she nailed it in that regard.
How do you think these portraits fit into the larger genre of black portraiture?
Black people have a slightly different relationship with portraiture [than other groups] because we didn’t have [representations] in the past great black generals and celebrities. This is a fairly new phenomenon of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. So on one hand these portraits, being in the portrait gallery, being of a president and a first lady, fulfill that [classic historical function]. But in terms of black people I think that these are two works that are very much preoccupied with a notion of style and given that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were paragons of style when they first came onto the scene and probably still represent that, these works really do provide a continuum of that interest in the black body as evocative, as making a statement that perhaps goes beyond a realism and goes into a certain ethos of pride, of cool, of struggle, of all sorts of issues that really do exemplify the experience.
How do you think these portraits fit into the larger genre of presidential portraiture?
Totally different, they don’t look like anything you would see in the National Portrait Gallery. There was a moment, I think, in the ’60s where a few artists did some wild pictures of Jackie Kennedy and also of JFK, but that was a wild moment anyway. By and large the tradition is pretty conservative, and the portraits are mostly done by official portrait painters. These just stick out in a delightful way.