#7: "Spring Awakening"

 

    I bought a bouquet of baby pink roses and officially decided it’s spring. This followed a soft bubblegum pink manicure and pedicure. I’m clearly influenced by color a lot (if you didn’t know that by now, I don’t know what to tell you), but this time I felt more aware of my time on earth; everything is starting to feel rosy.


    Spring is a time for cleaning. It's the quarter-year check-up, the point where you ask yourself if you’ve started the year right. The truth is that pink is the color of love and affection. Although mistaken for a gendered colour, pink makes us feel alert, bubbly, and perhaps even more passionate than we believe. Pink was the color most associated with the Rococo period in France. The Roman goddess, Venus, of intimacy and love, was also painted in pink. It is the color synonymous with breast cancer. Pink belongs to Sharpay Evans in 2006. It's too light to be a rouge but too dark to be coloured white. Similar to orange, pink is also a transitional color. As the semester progresses and seems to run faster than lightning, these roses sitting on my coffee table remind me that along with every transformation is an awakening.


    Amy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024) is a portrait that stands 123 inches high (I know this because I saw it in person at the Whitney Museum last summer). I chose this portrait because it not only adheres to the traditional standard of portraiture—that being, a pictorial representation of a person—but because portraiture is frankly, my favorite genre in art. Sherald’s typical pigment of black is prevalent in all her works, and her sleek, fine brushstrokes render the figure almost sculptural; Sherald creates an opulent presence of the subject, and even without context, it speaks volumes.


    In many ways, the portrait challenges the Western standard of who is allowed to be a subject. Here is a Black transgender woman, emulating the role of the Statue of Liberty as she faces forward with confidence and poise, holding space for only herself. Her corseted dress, echoing the infamous Vivienne Westwood bone structure, implies elegance—but not necessarily luxury. Sherald is not here to commodify the subject but rather to prostrate her, to remind the viewer that, regardless of who you are, while you look at this painting, that is, this woman is exactly who she thinks she is. Her torch, full of springing flowers, blooms toward the sky; it acts as the personality object.


    Sherald suggests that any person, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or class, is worthy of being the subject of a portrait. “Trans Forming Liberty” moves away from aristocratic ideals and embraces a diverse modern society. It embraces realism instead of feeding into the ideal. We have a transgender woman defying all odds by simply existing. Sherald released this piece to reconfigure our understanding of Liberty as an American nationalist figure, and perhaps as someone who transforms, just like our understanding of portraiture. Echoing elements of the Renaissance, “Trans Forming Liberty” is almost humanistic in its approach to center the human subject. It isn’t biblical or mythological in meaning, but it is retelling the story of a national figure through the most diverse lens. That is portraiture: the conception of pictorial representation as a means to confront the truth regarding the canon of Western art and ultimately to preserve its historical image in the continuum of space and time.

    I believe Sherald knows this as well, since she cancelled her Smithsonian exhibition after discovering that “Trans Forming Liberty” wouldn’t be displayed to avoid provoking President Donald Trump in 2025. What she did was an act of activism. More precisely, it was the union of art and politics that led to the exhibition’s representation. “Trans Forming Liberty” serves as a wake-up call to reassess our ways of living, to walk with our heads held high in times of hope and despair, and ultimately to emerge from the rested seeds we planted earlier in the year, ready to awaken our senses when they are needed most. And remember, no matter how cute a pink wig is, it will always stand out in the best possible way.