How do we imagine our own futures? The answer is influenced by what we see in art, in films, on our screens, or hear in music. Take love. If you think about the way it has been depicted in art, your mind might go to Rodin’s figures, forever chiselled into one; Klimt’s couple showered in gold; or Brâncuși’s abstractly fused lovers. Another frequently recycled image is Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square: a black-and-white photograph of a sailor in a Hollywood-style embrace with a woman, a dental assistant, watched by onlookers celebrating the end of the second world war, published in Life magazine in 1945.
While these images are undeniably romantic, they also show a particular experience of love. In 2022, Amy Sherald sought to change this – to make “a history that’s not present within art history” – with her three-by-two-metre painting, For love, and for country, that reworked V-J Day in Times Square to create a joyous painting of two Black male sailors replicating the passionate embrace.
It wasn’t until I saw this work that I became aware of the dearth of images like it in art history. Images are powerful: they can change conversations, make people feel seen, accepted, and normalise alternative ways of living and loving. “We’re in a place where same-sex marriages are being threatened and where, oftentimes, there’s fatal violence against transgender and non-binary people,” Sherald told me in 2022. “There’s a long history of censorship and erasure that’s weighed down the gay kiss, and it’s often excluded from view.” By immortalising this image in paint, and executing it on the scale of old masters, Sherald is sending a message that this expression of love is also worthy of display on our gallery walls.
I thought about the power of For love, and for country when seeing all the images of Kamala Harris taking to the stand as she races to beat Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election. While Harris is not the first Black woman to run for president – Shirley Chisholm beat her to that in 1972, seeking to be the Democratic party’s nominee – she is the first who seems likely to go all the way. It gives me hope, because for future generations, this extraordinary sight will become normal.
Sadly, images of female figures of authority have often been spun to vilify the women themselves. During Trump’s campaign in 2016, unofficial vendors reworked the composition of Cellini’s 1545 statue Perseus and Medusa, picturing Trump as the muscular hero who has just decapitated his opponent Hillary Clinton. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Poseidon raped Medusa. As her punishment, she was cursed with a petrifying gaze, and later beheaded by Perseus. Featuring the head of Clinton/Medusa being held up like a prize, this image brutally embodied the notion of a woman who has been silenced for her “power”, which her murderer then appropriates. As the writer Natalie Haynes recently told me, at no point in Ovid does Medusa actively use her petrifying gaze: it is only after she has been killed that it is used to turn people to stone.
The image of violence against, and the silencing of, women is ubiquitous in art history – and pop culture. Is it because of this exposure, the acceptance of this violence, that society deems it OK to treat women like this?
In luminous paintings – including the official portrait of Michelle Obama, who endorsed Harris on Friday – Sherald depicts many aspects of Black life, including some that had hitherto been marginalised. Speaking of For love, and for country, Sherald told me: “The level of violence inflicted on these communities is because of, I think, a lack of exposure. If you don’t know about it, if you never learn about it, and you see something that’s different from you, then you’re not open to it.”
The power of art lies in its ability to tell nuanced and complex stories, from a perspective imbued with humanity. Whether it’s accepting that anyone can run for president, that anyone can love who they like, Sherald concludes: “You have to have these conversations early on, for people to understand that people are just people – and that love is love.”
• Amy Sherald: American Sublime is at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from 16 November to 9 March 2025.
