Amy Sherald


Amy Sherald is an American painter based in Baltimore, Maryland. She is best known for her portrait paintings. Her choices of subjects look to enlarge the genre of American art historical realism by telling African-American stories within their own tradition. She is well known for using grisaille to portray skin tones in her work as a way of "challenging the concept of color-as-race." Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects.

Early life

Sherald was born on August 30, 1973 in Columbus, Georgia to dentist Amos P. Sherald III and Geraldine W. Sherald. As a child, her parents wanted her career to be in medicine, and discouraged her from pursuing art. Speaking about how her mother's discouragement had increased her determination, Sherald told The Cut:
My mother did not want me to become an artist. She was a black woman born in 1930s Alabama where everything was really about surviving. I always say that she was the perfect mother for me, because what I needed was somebody to prove wrong. I’m a strong woman because I was raised by one, and I’m a better person for that.
Despite being Interested in art from a young age, Sherald recalls not realizing it could be a profession until around the age of eight upon visiting a museum for the first time. She recalls how important it was to see artwork in a museum, saying,
What was so shocking when I first went to a museum, was to find out that art wasn't something in a book, in an encyclopedia, that people did a long time ago, that it was real life. And then, when I saw an image of a person of color, it all came together in that moment-that this was something real, that somebody created this who was alive at the same time that I was alive.

Education

Sherald received a B.A. degree in painting in 1997 Clark Atlanta University. After an apprenticeship with Arturo Lindsay, an art history professor at Spelman College, she attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, receiving an M.F.A. degree in painting in 2004. While attending MICA, Sherald studied with abstract expressionist painter Grace Hartigan, from whom she learned the "dripping method" of painting. She later followed up her studies with painter Odd Nerdrum in Larvik, Norway.

Career

Sherald is based in Baltimore, and documents contemporary African-American experience in the United States through large-scale portraits, often working from photographs of strangers she encounters on the streets. This approach is evocative of the late Barkley L. Hendricks.
In 1997, Sherald participated in Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama. She prepared and curated shows in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru. She has taught art in the Baltimore City Detention Center, and in 2008 she did a residency the Tongxian Art Center in Beijing, China.
She first came to prominence in 2016 when her painting, Miss Everything , won the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The competition noted that "Sherald creates innovative, dynamic portraits that, through color and form, confront the psychological effects of stereotypical imagery on African-American subjects". She was the first woman and first African-American to win the competition.
In 2018, Equilibrium was installed on the wall of the Parkway Theatre located in Baltimore. The project was funded through the 2014 Transformative Art Prize grant, an initiative that installs public artworks in underused public places in Baltimore. The original painting is in the permanent collection of the Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal.
Sherald's solo exhibition, titled "the heart of the matter..." took place in fall 2019 at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City. The exhibition featured eight, large scale oil portraits. Writing on the same issue, Erin Christovale, an associate curator at the Hammer Museum noted that “There’s something about the grayness that doesn’t mute the paintings but allows you to really think about the various skin tones and cultures and spaces that the African diaspora exists in."

First Lady Portrait

The year after Sherald won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, she was chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait. On February 12, 2018 the National Portrait Gallery unveiled the portrait, making Sherald the first African-American woman to paint an official First Lady portrait. The double portrait unveiling ceremony was attended by Barack and Michelle Obama. It was noted that Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, the painter of Barack Obama's portrait, were the first African-American artists to make official presidential portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, and also as artists who each early on prioritized African-American portraiture. Holland Cotter noted in a review that they both blend fact and fiction in their portraiture.
Sherald's portrait of Obama drew high numbers of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery. In response to criticism about the painting, such as, "Why is she gray?’...It doesn’t look like her," she summarized her responses by eloquently noting “Some people like their poetry to rhyme. Some people don’t.”
With the reveal of Michelle Obama’s :File:Michelle Obama by Amy Sherald.jpg|portrait, there were many criticisms with how it was viewed since it was less formal as many had expected. The portrait itself has hidden "personal and societal meaning behind them" that allows the audience to feel a connection when they see the portrait. The portrait was meant to show that people could relate to the former First Lady because of the simplicity of the portrait and how the depiction of her was meant to be seen as how others looked up to her. From the portrait, the former First Lady is seen gazing at the audience with deep thought. Amy Sherald painted the portrait in gray was because she was using her "signature grayscale" to show Michelle Obama's skin tone which can allude tp being intentional. Sherald chose this to be intentional to give the viewer an incentive to view Obama simply in her entirety as a person rather than based solely on her racial identity. The choice of colors forces the viewer to look past her identity to see her in the way “women can relate to—no matter what shape, size, race, or color....” The portrait has a voice with a meaningful interpretation that moves others and learn about the history behind it.

Personal life

Sherald was diagnosed at the age of 30 with congestive heart failure. She was the recipient of a heart transplant in December 18, 2012 at the age of 39.

Exhibitions