The Obama Presidential Portraits, Which Smashed Attendance Records in DC, Will Travel the US on a Five-Museum Tour

The portraits of president
Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have been a windfall for the
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C.,
smashing attendance records and serving as a site for many an
emotional visit. Now, the two paintings, done by Kehinde Wiley and
Amy Sherald, are hitting the road.

Beginning in June 2021, the
portraits will travel to five museums across the country, stopping
at each for roughly two months: the Art Institute of Chicago; the
Brooklyn Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the High
Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

It’s not unprecedented for
presidential portraits to travel. An entire exhibition of them,
“Portraits of the Presidents from the National Portrait Gallery,”
hit numerous cities between 2000 and 2005, for instance. The famous
“Lansdowne” portrait of President George Washington was once sent
out to seven venues between 2002-04.

Still, for the Obama portraits
to travel so soon after their completion is something of a
rarity. 

“I have to give credit to Anne
Pasternak at the Brooklyn Museum,” the NPG’s director, Kim Sajet,
tells Artnet News. “She rang
me within a couple of weeks within the unveiling and said, ‘When
can they come to our place?’ We hadn’t thought about touring them
until then.”

The public furor around the
portraits was at an all-time high then and so the conversation was
put on a back burner. But other directors started to reach out with
the same request. So did the artists.

“I remember Amy Sherald saying,
‘As a young girl in Atlanta, there was no way I could afford to go
to Washington to see a work like that,” Sajet recalls. Soon after
that, she reached back out to her museum director colleagues and
set up the tour. “It was the easiest couple of calls I’ve ever
made,” she says.

The tour destinations were
chosen largely for their connection to the artists and the Obamas,
explains Sajet. The first stop, the Art Institute of Chicago (June
18–August 15, 2021), lives in Obama’s hometown and will coincide
with the former Commander-in-Chief’s 60th birthday. The paintings
will then travel to Brooklyn (August 27–October 24, 2021), where
Wiley’s studio is based, and Los Angeles, where he was
born. 

Atlanta, Sherald’s old stomping
grounds, will follow as the portraits stop at the High Museum of
Art (January 14–March 13, 2022), before moving on to Houston (March
25–May 30, 2022), the final stop of the tour.

The presidential portraits,
unveiled two years ago next month, more than doubled the NPG’s
attendance figures, a pattern still going strong today. Roughly
30,000 people a day trekked to see the paintings after they debuted
in the museums. Sajet said the staff members were coming in on
weekends and off days to meet the demand, and that six month’s
worth of brochures were gone in six weeks. 

To date, the portraits have been
visited by over 4 million people in total. 

“Because of the attention the
portraits brought to the museum, so many people discovered Portrait
Gallery for the first time,” says Sajet. “They came to see the
portraits and then stayed to look at everything else. I hope that
is exactly what will happen at the museums where they’ll go on
tour.”

The post The Obama Presidential Portraits, Which Smashed
Attendance Records in DC, Will Travel the US on a Five-Museum
Tour appeared first on artnet News.