Art: All the Forgotten Bliss (the Early Bird): Or, How to Look Effortlessly Iconic While Dragging Art History by Its Colonial Wig

There she stands: serene, statuesque, serving summertime grace in a crop top and scalloped shorts like the patron saint of peaceful Black leisure. All the Forgotten Bliss (the Early Bird) isn’t just a portrait—it’s a statement wrapped in satin calm and straw-woven shade. And no, she’s not smiling. Because smiling is for you. This moment? It’s for her.

This is Amy Sherald at her most quietly defiant. You might know her as the artist who painted Michelle Obama into America’s collective retina with a poise so divine it made even Fox News do a double take. But if you think Sherald is only about “Black elegance,” you’re missing the revolution she’s staging in real time—with a paintbrush, a flat background, and a color story that could silence Pantone.

Born in 1973 in Columbus, Georgia, Sherald trained in the tradition of classical portraiture—a realm typically reserved for dead European men and the women they controlled. But rather than replicate the tools of that tradition, she turned them inside out. She uses grisaille (monochrome gray tones) to render skin—not to bleach out race, but to neutralize the viewer’s racial expectations. When you look at one of her figures, your brain can’t lazily code them as “type”—you have to confront them as person. Radical.

Sherald’s subjects are everyday Black Americans—dressed not for church, protest, or survival, but for the sacred act of living. They wear swimsuits, glasses, suits, Converse sneakers, vintage dresses. They pose not for approval but in possession. There is no trauma here. No spectacle. Just being. And that, my friend, is quietly revolutionary in a visual culture that often only validates Blackness through pain or performance.

She paints people who don’t need to be anything for you. And that unnerves people used to control.

Let’s return to our protagonist. She’s not doing much—at least not in the eyes of a hustle culture that equates motion with meaning. But in a historical context where Black women’s bodies were once catalogued, surveilled, and pressed into labor or spectacle, the very stillness of this figure is electric. And her leisure? A loaded weapon, painted mint green and tied with a bow.

Then there’s that brilliant blue bird dangling like a medallion of myth. A callback to early mornings? A nod to freedom? Or a wink at survival—because being first doesn’t always mean being seen. Sherald doesn’t decode the metaphor for you. She doesn’t need to. The bird is flight, and perhaps that’s enough. Or maybe it’s a dare: catch the bird, but don’t clip its wings.

The background is flat, orange-peach like sherbet, like heat, like calm—removing any sense of place so the subject exists outside of time. This isn’t your grandmother’s portrait. It isn’t bound to a sofa, or a colonial interior, or a plantation porch. This is post-history, post-oppression, post-explanation.

It’s the bliss that history forgot—and that Sherald has the gall to remember.

Sherald’s work unplugs from the “representation” debate and plugs into something more potent: the right to self-define without footnotes. Her figures are not role models or activists or saints. They are beautiful in their normalcy. Their ordinariness becomes monumental, not because they strive for greatness, but because they simply are—with dignity, clarity, and color-coordinated joy.

In All the Forgotten Bliss, Sherald paints the opposite of trauma-porn. She paints recovery. Peace. The glorious middle space between struggle and triumph, where one might just sit with themselves in sunlight and be enough. The early bird doesn’t always get the worm. Sometimes it gets perspective.

What would your life look like if no one was watching—and you didn’t need to prove a damn thing?

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