Breonna Taylor 2020

Amy Sherald’s “Breonna Taylor” is a portrait painted with oil on canvas, and it stops me in my tracks. The way Sherald handles color is so interesting, isn’t it? That cool blue background, almost like a dream space, against the turquoise dress, it sets a mood. And then the grayscale skin tones – wow. It’s like she’s saying something about presence and absence, reality and representation, all at once. I can only imagine what Sherald was thinking, what she felt, while she was making this. How she was trying to communicate her understanding of Breonna Taylor's life. I think about other portrait painters, like Alice Neel. There's a thread of empathy that runs through their work that gets me every time. Anyway, paintings don’t give us all the answers, but they do invite us into a conversation, right? And that’s what makes them so alive, so necessary.