Houston, Texas

Where: Museum of Fine Arts; Houston, Texas

When: 4/3/22–5/30/22

Official portraits of President Barrack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama begin a five-city tour in June at the Art Institute of Chicago. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, the tour will give the paintings a much larger audience, who can view them along with additional educational materials and events.

In keeping with the Obama’s unprecedented, transformative tenure in the Whitehouse, the portraits are strikingly contemporary and memorable. The artists meet the challenge of their iconic subjects. Amy Sherald and Kehinde Whiley, both African American, represent a generational turn towards figurative painting as a means of exploring personal identity and notions of American Blackness. Whiley is famed for his flamboyantly decorated paintings of anonymous Black men in poses that recall famous historical paintings. His warmly sedate portrait, President Barack Obama, is a canonical portrait all his own. Amy Sherald, whose subjects are painted en grisaille, as if drained of skin color, are simultaneously familiar and unsettling. Her Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is utterly singular; memorable but also unknowable.

Their paintings give us all the chance to reflect on the Obamas, and what they mean to us as a nation.