KULCHA!

Michelle Obama on her official portrait: "I'm also thinking about all the young people, particularly girls and girls of color, who in years ahead will come to this place and they will look up, and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall." pic.twitter.com/EGwPaiKJhA

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) February 12, 2018

The first African American painter of the first African American president is crying while thanking his mother for getting him paints while they didn’t have much, growing up in south central LA.

— laura olin (@lauraolin) February 12, 2018

The iconography of the Obamas has always been one of the most fascinating things about their public lives. Their deliberate and welcome assertions of blackness in privileged spaces continues here with striking portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. https://t.co/4G3TrgygiP

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) February 12, 2018

More werds, from professional art critics. Jerry Saltz, at NYMag:

… Wiley rises to the occasion, giving us a troubled, human, pure-of-heart Rock of Gibraltar seated on a hard wooden seat that hints at the bare-bones look of African tribal chairs. The president is seated in and among — not out front and center of — a verdigris overgrowth of flowers. He’s almost fighting for the stage that is already growing over him. But he remains. Real, insistent, a reminder or compass. By not resorting to his usual bravado and monumental, heroic grandiosity that tends to so elevate his subjects that the paintings become closer to kitsch, Wiley’s treatment of Obama allows the person and the ideas represented to bloom much more fully.

Seating the president lower this way, enmeshing him in an overabundant, highly colorful natural setting, sustains a much more mysteriously human presence, brooding, reconciling, not merely knowing, separate, but kindled with fiery curiosity, a simple inner elevation that brings us to the border of the ordinary and the extraordinary. It’s exactly the metaphysical place Obama embodied as president of all America. The pose and enclosing him this way will irk many who will see Obama being made too normal, small, not central, not in grandeur, not an imperial god. I think the picture is true to the way Obama carries himself. He’s clearly the central subject but not entirely central; there’s a lot going on around him to contend with, negotiate; he’s open to his surroundings, part of them, bigger than they are but not the only thing present. He’s still fighting for space. Wiley even gets some of Obama’s melancholy, his tranquilizing thoughtfulness, the whispering sense that he will not be smote…

Phillip Kennicott, at the Washington Post:

… [B]oth artists have stressed the importance of creating portraiture of African Americans that will reconfigure the canon and the museum in more inclusive ways. Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery, remembers seeing Sherald engage with young African American girls at a gallery talk. “She bent down and looked at them and said, ‘I painted this for you so that when you go to a museum you will see someone who looks like you on the wall.’ ” Wiley, too, has focused throughout his career on inserting black faces and figures into the traditional context of elite, aristocratic portraiture, although with ambiguous results: It is never clear whether the goal is to remedy the omission, or destabilize the tradition.

The two portraits render their subjects life-size, which underscores their historical importance and accomplishments. Although the artists worked independently of each other, and their works aren’t meant to be seen side by side (they will reside in different galleries when they go on view), they make a curious pairing. Both capture elements that their subjects carefully curated during their public life as president and first lady. A swelling vein on the left side of the president’s face, and the intensity of his gaze, suggest the “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” impatience that occasionally flashed from him, a marked contrast with the smiling and laughing photographic portraits by Chuck Close that have until now stood in for the official portrait in the “America’s Presidents” exhibition…

The Obamas’ potential to change the tone and political culture of this country was blunted by the persistence of that racism before and during their time at the country’s political apex. Now that they have left office, now that their fundamental decency is in high relief by contrast with the new political order, memory is refreshed. They look a bit older than the two people who carried so much collective fantasy of a different America with them to Washington nine years ago. That fantasy was premature and unrealistic, and it is only now clear how powerfully it animated the meanest impulses of those who reject it. But these portraits will remind future generations how much wish fulfillment was embodied in the Obamas, and how gracefully they bore that burden.

Sidebar, also from WaPo, fashion writer Robin Givhan: “The Michelle Obama portrait is striking — and so is the gown she wore for it. This is its story”. Stretch cotton poplin and side-seam pockets, yes!

Second sidebar, I am extremely glad Twitter finally pulled Paul Nehlen’s account before the unveiling. I hope it’s causing him severe emotional pain not to be able to share his ‘thoughts’.

shit Trump's gonna have his portrait done by that Jon McNaughton douche isn't he

— Zeddy (@Zeddary) February 12, 2018

(Only if someone else writes the check, because as I understand it McNaughton only works cash-up-front.)