[Asma Naeem] This painting is titled, "What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth." Amy Sherald painted it in 2017. We meet Alice holding a small 35 millimeter camera close to her chest. Her body tilts slightly to one side, and her gaze is steady, direct, but not confrontational. A photographer taking in her subject, ensuring the composition is working. That tension between looking and being looked at runs through much of Sherald's work. Her painting process begins with photographs. She takes herself using the camera as a tool to build the characters and narratives. She later paints. Painters have long used photography in their process, but for Sherald, her use of a camera draws upon a long lineage of Black image making from renowned abolitionist, Frederick Douglass being the most photographed person in the 19th century, to studio portraits by artists such as James Van Der Zee, to photojournalism by the likes of the legendary Gordon Parks. Reshaping photography's aims of objective truth, those artists use the camera to assert dignity and authorship and to take control of how they were represented. Sherald carries that impulse forward on the canvas. And then there's the title. "What's different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth." Sherald paints the figure, Alice, in her signature gray scale. Around her color blooms, the pistachio green background, the coral sweater, the patterned turquoise skirt, her red nails and gold jewelry add flashes of warmth and individuality. Every detail feels like a small act of self-definition. Alice meets our gaze with clarity and calm. Her camera is primed to snap a picture, perhaps of you. She's not just someone being seen, she's someone who sees. Alice and we, the viewer, mirror each other. Together, we share the act of looking, occupying the roles of looker and subject as the line between reality and imagination blurs.