Barack and Michelle Obama can’t catch a break — not even on the day their official White House portraits were unveiled.

Los Angeles native Kehinde Wiley’s painting of the first black president and Amy Sherald’s rendition of the former first lady are raising hackles on the right.

Media Matters noted how previous work by Wiley is being pictured as racist.

“Pro-Trump trolls are smearing Wiley by claiming his rendition of Judith beheading Holofernes, a modern twist on a classical theme including works by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and others, is a ‘queen’ cutting off the head of a young white child.”

Left out was the context.

“Wiley’s painting was part of a series of portraits of women he entitled An Economy of Grace. The artist is known for remixing ‘classical European art with black urban youth.’

“As Upworthy’s Parker Molloy documented, the smearing seems ‘clearly pretty coordinated’ and the manufactured outrage echoes other stunts pro-Trump trolls have pulled to garner mainstream media attention and shape narratives, like suing over all-women screenings of Wonder Woman, or disrupting a Shakespeare play over its depiction of the murder of Julius Caesar.”

In any case, The Guardian did a good job on Monday’s unveilings at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Wiley said: “In a very symbolic way, what I’m doing is charting his path on earth through those plants that weave their way. There’s a fight going on between he in the foreground and the plants that are trying to announce themselves underneath his feet. Who gets to be the star of the show? The story or the man who inhabits that story?”

Some pro and con reactions

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