Paint & Pitchfork: Illustrating Blackness | The New Yorker Documentary

Must Watch - Paint & Pitchfork: Illustrating Blackness | The New Yorker Documentary

In a documentary by Christine Turner, the painters behind the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama share their thoughts on the portrayal of Black bodies on canvas.

Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa in the New Yorker describes the genesis of the film:

"When the filmmaker Christine Turner got a call from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (lacma) asking whether she’d be willing to make a film about the painters Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. She’d followed the work of both artists for several years, once even going to see Sherald’s work in New York while nine months pregnant. And she knew that the only way to showcase Wiley and Sherald in all their glory, she told me, was to “give them the same reverence, dignity, and respect” that they grant their own sitters. The final product, “Paint & Pitchfork,” explores the unfinished legacies of two Black cultural icons, and how in painting themselves, their subjects, and their people into the art-historical record they attempt to rectify the social and cultural absence of, as Wiley says, in the film 'people who happen to look like me.'"