Oprah Winfrey, 69, commands attention like no other — can you think of any other cultural institution who’s accomplished as much, from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to Oprah’s Book Club to her hundreds of millions donated to charities? — so it makes sense that her portrait unveiling ceremony at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery would similarly captivate a room like this one Wednesday morning.
A hush fell over the room 10 minutes early. Was she in the room with us? Which curtain would she waltz out of? Will she be wearing purple?
“As I stand here on the eve of my 70th birthday,” she told a packed room, “to have a portrait included in the National Portrait Gallery, alongside all the greats: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ida B. Wells, Michelle and Barack Obama, Lean Horne, John F Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey…”
Deep purple tables dotted the Smithsonian’s courtyard, where more than 340 guests milled and munched on muffins fruit, quiches and donuts. If you thought you spotted Gayle King, Ava DuVernay, Christian Siriano, you’d be right.
Purple coats, purple dresses, purple suits, purple scarves, purple ties, purple purses — a timely hue that colored (heh) her 2023 Favorite Things list and shares a name with the Winfrey-produced film “The Color Purple” (out Christmas Day), a musical reboot of the original, in which she starred.
So, yes, she wore a purple taffeta Christian Siriano dress for the 6-foot-10 inch by 5-foot-8-inch portrait (and no, she said in public remarks, she didn’t know the movie would be coming out this month when she agreed to the painting).
“That color has been seminal in my life,” she added, referencing her role as Sofia in the 1985 film, which her local news bosses only gave her two weeks to shoot. She needed two months to complete the movie, and she gave up all her leave time to do — and she later learned the importance of betting on herself.
Winfrey, who turns 70 next month, recalled a poem Maya Angelou wrote for her 50th birthday. “My wish for you / Is that you continue / Continue / To be who and how you are / To astonish a mean world / With your acts of kindness.”
That’s what Winfrey intends to keep embodying: “To continue to astonish a mean world with my acts of kindness and continue to live in the space of gratitude and move and have my being in all of that which is God.”
Oprah Winfrey portrait artist Shawn Michael Warren: ‘I didn’t tell her how to pose’
But back to the portrait, which will live on display until October 2024. In it, Winfrey stands in her Montecito, California, prayer garden and holding on olive branch.
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“The garden is just as important as her portrait because it’s her most vulnerable space,” says artist Shawn Michael Warren, who previously co-created a mural featuring Winfrey in Chicago’s West Loop. “And to get that version of her, really played a significant role in capturing a portait of her and capturing her essence too.”
It exudes patience, peace, poise — something Warren understands.
“I didn’t tell her how to pose the entire time,” he says recounting that fateful six-hour photoshoot day two years prior. “It’s like, you’ve been in front of the camera for as long as I’ve been alive. So you know what to do. We’ll find it when it comes to us.” The oil painting on canvas portrait took him 10 months; he multi-tasked with other ongoing projects.
Since 1994 — with the portrait of late President George H.W. Bush — the National Portrait Gallery has commissioned just about 35 portraits of living subjects by contemporary artists. A rarity, given the gallery houses more than 26,000 works of art.
“It was precisely for moments such as this, that Congress founded the National Portrait Gallery in 1962,” says Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “To tell the stories of remarkable individuals who have made significant contributions to U.S. history and culture, to (show) the skill of the nation’s most accomplished artists, a museum where art and biography come together to tell the American story.”
Oprah Winfrey captivates with portrait unveiling speech: ‘God can dream a bigger dream for you’
Winfrey still can’t believe this is her life. She walked through her house last week and gasped at the view from the French window in her dining room. Was she dreaming?
She told a locked audience: “I recalled my favorite Bible verse in that moment, Acts 17:28 ‘in God, I will move and breathe and have my being.’ And I thought, ‘I am moving and breathing in the space that is God right now.’ And I am living in this dream that God had for me, because I don’t know how I got from Mississippi to Montecito with that view.”
She knew she was destined for something bigger from the age of 4, speaking at church. “I could feel that there was something inside me, I could hear that still small voice,” she said. “And I started to pay attention to it at a very young age. And that still small voice has led me to this day. … I learned to lean into it and to understand that God can dream a bigger dream for you than you can ever dream for yourself. Because of all the dreams that I had, I didn’t even know there was a national gallery.”
Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs for the National Portrait Gallery hopes people will walk away from the portrait with “a sense of joy, a sense of promise, a sense of grace, and of feeling connected.”
At least that’s what it means for Combs – and likely many future viewers: “I can’t help but sort of have a little flutter in my heart, just a sense of delight.”
