Former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled their portraits for the National Portrait Gallery today. Each one picked “acclaimed African-American artists to portray them.” From NBC News:
“Pretty sharp!” Barack Obama quipped of his portrait, painted by Kehinde Wiley — an artist best known for his vibrant, large-scale paintings of African-Americans. The former president also joked about how he had to negotiate to reduce the number of grays hairs and make his ears look smaller in the painting.Obama also thanked Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama, for capturing the “grace, and beauty, and intelligence, and charm and hotness” of his wife.Sherald and Wiley are the first African-American artists to create Smithsonian-commissioned portraits of a former president and first lady. And their subjects make history once more, as the first black presidential spouses to be immortalized in the gallery.”The ability to be first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president…it doesn’t get any better than that,” Wiley said during his remarks.
The portraits have received some reactions on social media:
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