Hello sailors: what these two kissing seamen can tell us about Kamala Harris’s White House bid

With this luminous painting, Amy Sherald sought to ‘uncensor’ a passionate act that should only ever have been regarded as normal. It came to mind as I watched Harris setting her sights on the presidency

How do we imagine our own futures? The answer is influenced by what we see in art, in films, on our screens, or hear in music. Take love. If you think about the way it has been depicted in art, your mind might go to Rodin’s figures, forever chiselled into one; Klimt’s couple showered in gold; or Brâncuși’s abstractly fused lovers. Another frequently recycled image is Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square: a black-and-white photograph of a sailor in a Hollywood-style embrace with a woman, a dental assistant, watched by onlookers celebrating the end of the second world war, published in Life magazine in 1945.

While these images are undeniably romantic, they also show a particular experience of love. In 2022, Amy Sherald sought to change this – to make “a history that’s not present within art history” – with her three-by-two-metre painting, For love, and for country, that reworked V-J Day in Times Square to create a joyous painting of two Black male sailors replicating the passionate embrace.