This painting marked a turning point for American artist Amy Sherald in 2018, just after the national attention surrounding her portrait of Michelle Obama. It was the first work she made after that historic commission and one of the first in which her imagined world opened into a full landscape. Sherald said she had wanted for years to place figures in an open field, and the rocket arrived as a symbol of “unlimited potential,” but also as something coded in American culture as white and male. Here, she reclaims that symbolic space. Two young Black women stand barefoot in a wide field of dry yellow grass, seen mostly from behind as they hold hands. The woman at right turns her head back toward us, with a calm, direct, slightly questioning gaze. The other looks forward toward a rocket launch in the distance. Sherald paints both figures in her signature grayscale rather than naturalistic skin color, while their clothing carries vivid life. The woman on the left wears a white shirt with a high-waisted blue skirt. The other wears a striped dress in bright bands of pink, orange, yellow, and green, with a white bow at her hair. At the far left, a rocket lifts into the sky, its plume running almost like a vertical white scar or beacon beside them. The horizon sits low, making the sky feel immense and the figures quietly monumental. The two sitters were not celebrities but women Sherald met through a Baltimore school community, one a teacher and one a graduate, which matters. Everyday Black life, not spectacle, is the center of the picture. Their joined hands suggest solidarity, intimacy, and shared witness. The title stretches between machinery and mystery as well as between earthly limits and mental freedom. Sherald turns the “spaces in between” into a zone of dreaming, self-possession, and possibility for an image of Black womanhood not under scrutiny, but already sovereign.
"Planes, rockets, and the spaces in between" by Amy Sherald (American) - Oil on canvas / 2018 - Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #AmySherald #Sherald #BaltimoreMuseumOfArt #artBMA #BMA #art #artText #BlackArt #AmericanArt #BlackArtist #WomenArtists
