By: Ajani Anderson (’21), Staff Writer
Standing in front of Amy Sherald’s painting ‘Miss Everything,’ I feel like a little girl again. The painting depicts a girl. Her hands, clad in white gloves, are delicately holding a teacup. There’s a little red hat on her head and she’s wearing a navy and white polka dot dress. She’s cute and classy, and as I look up at her, hanging on the walls of the North Carolina Museum of Art, I remember being 8 years old on a Saturday morning.
I used to host tea parties for my dolls every Saturday morning. It was a ritual I took so seriously that I had not one, but two miniature china tea sets, a pair of white gloves, and a special tea-hosting dress. It was a sacred time between me and my dolls, where I was an elegant princess, they were important political figures, and we had important matters of state to discuss. But I remember one thing that soured my weekly tea-times. Not one to half do anything, I had scoured every movie I could find for examples of properly hosting a tea, and it seemed that those who got to wear the gloves and drink out of the china sets were always white, with coiffed straight hair, and light eyes. The people who looked like me were usually serving them. So, if every Saturday morning I imagined my eyes a little bluer, my skin a little lighter, and my hair a little straighter, it was all part of the effort to be a perfect host.
So, looking up at Miss Everything, I felt like I was 8 years old again, scouring our movie case for someone that looked like me that could be classy, elegant, and beautiful; except this time, 11 years later, I actually found it. This was a small moment. It wasn’t a life-changing realization for me that black women can drink tea too. What was life-changing was seeing Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama on every news outlet for a week, and watching her artwork being put in museums that until very recently, had kept black art off of their walls.
Though African American art has always been central to the culture, its visibility in museums has been incredibly low, and it is only in the past 10 years that there has been any major progress. While it may seem like there is a very small population of people who should and do care about what art is hung on the walls of museums, the importance is widespread. Museums are the places where we put the artwork that has most influenced our society, artwork that we respect, and artwork that we believe tells the important stories of the times in which it was created. Black Art is Black history. It is depictions of who we are, what we value, and the unlimited possibilities we have as a community. It has always been an instrumental tool to represent, give voice to, and break stereotypes of black people. For that to be left out of American museums is for a huge chunk of the black narrative to be left out of history.
Kehinde Wiley, the painter of Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, said: “There’s a type of permission being given when you are a young artist and you walk into a museum and happen to see someone who looks like you.” When blackness is uplifted in a place like a museum through depictions of powerful or beautiful or happy black people, it gives the viewers permission to adopt those words for themselves. This permission extends not only to artists but to every black person that sees themselves on the walls. Even in smaller museums, like the Nasher Museum in Durham, or even the Stone Center galleries here at UNC, the presence of blackness as a celebration and as something worthy of respect, is revolutionary. It tells 8-year-old girls that they can drink tea and become influential politicians, 18-year-old students that they can be artists, and gives black viewers permission to explore the possibilities presented to us by the mirrors we see on the wall.
