Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection is at BU’s Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery through March 1. Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts, theo tyson (above), was among the visitors to the exhibition.
This article was first published in BU Today on February 7, 2022. By Mara Sassoon. Photos by Cydney Scott.
EXCERPT
The striking pieces in the new BU exhibition Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection offer a welcome reprieve from the gray winter weather. Many of the 23 works on display use eye-catching materials—from glitter, rhinestones, and sequins to circuit boards, tiny bells, and glass beads. Featuring work by women, people of color, and artists working internationally, the show is at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery through March 1.
Among the pieces is Amy Sherald’s oil painting She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018)—the title a reference to a passage in the Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. It stands out for its relative simplicity, compared to many of the pieces in the gallery, but is vibrant and colorful nonetheless. In it, a woman with a stoic expression, wearing a bright orange cloche hat, teal shirt, and white floral-patterned pants, faces forward. She is set against a plain coral red background and looks outward, meeting the viewers’ gaze. Sherald has given much attention to the woman’s outfit, capturing the seeming heaviness of the large multistrand pearl necklace she’s wearing. The title of the work pairs with this intense focus given to the woman’s outward appearance—the viewer is privy only to what they see on the “outside.”
The title of Amy Sherald’s She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018) is a reference to a passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sherald is known for her portraits of Black people, famous and not, and renders all of her subjects in grisaille, a grayish monochrome.
The New Jersey–based Sherald is known for her portraits of Black people, both famous and not. First Lady Michelle Obama selected the artist to paint her official White House portrait, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Another one of Sherald’s works, a striking portrait of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman fatally shot by white police officers at her home in Louisville, Ky., in 2020, was featured on the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair. Sherald renders all of her subjects in grisaille—a grayish monochrome—often set against solid color backgrounds, like the painting in the Stone Gallery show.
“The story of why I paint my figures gray has evolved over the years. I’m not trying to take race out of the conversation, I’m just trying to highlight an interiority,” she said in a conversation with fellow artist Tyler Mitchell for Art in America in 2021. “In hindsight, I realize that I was avoiding painting people into a corner, where they’d have to exist in some universal way. I don’t want the conversation around my work to be solely about identity.”
Life Altering: Selections from a Kansas City Collection features pieces by women, people of color, and artists working internationally exploring such themes as identity, race, the experience of exile and diaspora. Among the pieces: Elias Sime’s Tightrope, Familiar Yet Complex 1 (2016).
All of the exhibition’s pieces come from the collection of Kansas City art collectors Bill and Christy Gautreaux, who have set out to acquire work by diverse artists. The works explore such themes as identity, race, the experience of exile and diaspora, and the impact of technology. Lissa Cramer (MET’18), managing director of Boston University Art Galleries, worked with independent curator Leesa Fanning to put together the show.
“Each work in this exhibition is just incredible,” Cramer says. “There’s so much diversity between artist, theme, medium—there are so many ways that these works can resonate with viewers.”