On a sunless morning last month, online chattering was specially restless. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC had just unveiled new presidential portraits and reactions, on Twitter and across group texts, spilled over into a passion. The artists Kehinde Wiley, known for his august furnishes of black humen that challenge notions of power and status, and Amy Sherald, the Baltimore painter whose run tests the volume of cultural identity, had recast Barack and Michelle Obama, respectively, in a proportion hitherto not supposed, dared, or seen in the public eye.
It had only been a year since the Obamas left the White House, and here they were again, just as many people remembered them–attentive, unshakable, full of grace–but they had also returned as something more: as living remembrances. As social media has heightened our appetite for constant modification, the style we process memories has drastically transformed–continually tied to the present and subject to alterations, often digitally–and ushered with it new rituals of remembrance.
No comments:
Post a Comment