Exhibition Guide

Visual Description

“Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” is a vertical oil painting on canvas, measuring 54 inches by 43 inches, of a young adult figure standing in the center of the composition, gazing outward toward the viewer, and holding an oversized teacup and saucer in front of her chest. Her skin tone is rendered in grayscale, and the painting crops her legs below the thighs. The background is a brilliant turquoise with faint red and purple speckles. The figure has closely cropped hair and wears an eye-catching, bright red fascinator with a large pompom on the right side of her head. The pompom just covers her right eyebrow. The figure wears a sleeveless dress that falls loosely over her body and past her knees. The dress is comprised of two adjoining panels that meet in a cream-colored, vertical seam at its center with a sliver of the same color fabric visible at the center hem of the skirt. The dress’s right side is solid navy blue, and the left side is decorated with a pattern of small, fuzzy, cream-colored polka dots. A cream-colored border also runs along the left, right, and neckline of the dress. The figure wears white, wrist-length dress gloves and holds the teacup with her right hand over the saucer that she holds in her left hand. 

 

Object Label

The path to Sherald’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama involves another painting—this one. It shattered barriers for the artist in 2016 when it won the Smithsonian’s acclaimed Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Sherald was the first woman and the first African American to win the competition.

The flash of red provided by this young girl’s hat draws attention to her inquiring gaze. She holds a playfully oversized teacup in a nod to Lewis Carroll’s novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), giving the painting a slightly surreal feeling. After more than a decade of dedicating herself to painting, Sherald first gained national attention with this striking work.