10/18/2024
COBALT Blue Dress. Of everything I saw at The Hirshhorn, this piece by is what I fell in love with the most.
The placard tells this story:
Amoako Boafo creates striking portraits that document and celebrate Blackness today. In this large painting of one of his friends, he limits his palette to bright blue, beige, and brown, adding visual interest by varying paint handling and texture.
Boafo is noted for his approach to painting Black skin: using gloved fingers, he swirls together multiple colors before touching up details with a fine brush, lending dimension and movement.
With its brilliant hues and confident subject, Cobalt Blue Dress matches the power of works by John Singer Sargent, the leading portrait painter of the late 1800s, who was renowned for representations of the elite. Boafo, however, expands portraitureās ability to elevate and honor subjects from a broader swath of class and race than was customary in Sargentās time.
So grateful for my girl .ish catching this photo of my friend and artist discussing the piece. I just remember my excitement talking about it and my heart lighting up as I thought about Amoako Boafo using his fingertips to swirl the hues on the canvas to create texture that artfully displayed the beauty and regalness of this black woman.
I just stood in awe staring at her beauty both inside and out, thinking about not just my own beauty but the beauty of women who look like me who for so long even when the world didnāt accept us as beautiful, weāve had to start on the inside and tell it to ourselves and then spread that knowing to the sister next to us in all of the hues of herself. Itās an inner language we use with one another from one black woman to the next that says, āI see you, sis.ā
Cheers to the woman wearing a Cobalt Blue Dress of your own. May you stand proud as we rewrite the stories of our beauty for ourselves, our children, and our ancestors. I see you, sis. š„