This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Amy Sherald.
Born: 30 August 1973, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Rising to fame after being hand-picked by former First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait, Amy Sherald is today one of the best-known Black American artists. She is part of a new generation of artists who have revived the Western art genre of portraiture by making it contemporary and relevant. Known for freeing her subjects from stereotypes and historical narratives of Black suffering, her artworks make a strong political statement about equality and the humanity of all subjects regardless of skin color.
Childhood
Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia to father Amos P. Sherald III, a dentist, and mother Geraldine W. Sherald. Sherald says of her mother, “She was a Black woman born in 1930s Alabama where everything was really about surviving.” Sherald was aware of race from a young age, as the other children at her school (St. Anne-Pacelli Catholic School) were predominantly white. On her first day of school, her mother told her “You’re different from everybody else […] You need to speak a certain way and act a certain way.”
Sherald loved art from a young age, often staying inside at recess to draw instead of going out to play. However, it never dawned on her that art could be a profession until her sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Columbus Museum and she realized that “art wasn’t something in a book, in an encyclopedia, that people did [art] a long time ago, that it was real life.” She encountered the painting Object Permanence (1986) by Bo Bartlett, a family portrait with the figure of the father as a Black man. Says Sherald, “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.”
Sherald resolved to become an artist, even though her parents (particularly her mother) pushed her toward a career in medicine. She says that her mother “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.” Sherald also felt a desire to create alternative narratives about being Black in America, as her upbringing in the South often presented Black experience as uniform.
Education and Early Training
After graduating high school, Sherald enrolled in a pre-med program at Clark Atlanta University in order to appease her parents. But she also indulged her own love of art by registering for a painting class at Spelman College during her sophomore year. There she met Panama-born artist and art historian Arturo Lindsay, whose work explored the African influence on American cultures. This encounter pushed her to give up her medical pursuits and dive into art. In 1996, Sherald participated in a residency at Maine College of Art Portland and in the following year took part in Spelman College’s International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama. That same year she graduated from Clark Atlanta with a degree in painting. She became involved with the art scene in Panama and took on a curatorial role, organizing shows for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Panama City as well as the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru.
The early 2000s saw unexpected turns in Sherald’s life. In 2000, Sherald’s father died of Parkinson’s disease. Around the same time, her aunt developed a brain infection. She went back to Georgia to help take care of her aging and ailing mother and two aunts. Busy with caregiving, she took a break from making art. After returning to Baltimore, she started painting again while teaching art at the Baltimore City Detention Center. She also picked up a job as a waitress to make ends meet. As she put it, “I did a job that I didn’t want to do, so I could do a job that I wanted to do.” Concurrently Sherald undertook a five-year apprenticeship with Lindsay, during which time she also enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. At MICA she studied under Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan, then in her 80s, who taught her the “drip method” of painting pioneered by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s. Although Sherald’s focus was and remains on figurative painting, the lessons of Abstract Expressionist “all-over” composition may have influenced her bold use of monochromatic, oftentimes subtly textured backgrounds in her portraits. In 2003, while training for a triathlon, Sherald went to her doctor for a checkup and learned that she had congestive heart failure. She was able to manage, earning an MFA in painting from MICA the following year, even though all of her activity, study and work put a strain on her heart.
During her time in Baltimore, Sherald developed what would become her method for painting portraits. She would often go up to strangers on the street and ask if she could photograph them. If they agreed, she would invite them for a photo session. Sherald notes that it can be difficult finding the right person to paint. When she does find someone, however, “it’s the same feeling that you get when you first saw your husband or wife,” she explains, “I look at them and I am like ‘ta da,'” adding that “There’s usually something a little awkward and quirky about them that really starts to get my mind thinking that I want to pursue them and make them into a painting.” During a session, Sherald would choose clothing (and sometimes props) for her subjects, often selected from their wardrobes. She prefers to photograph them out-of-doors, since, according to her, natural light best highlights the texture of the skin. She would then create large-scale portraits based off of the photographs she took.
After receiving her Master’s degree, Sherald went to Larvik, Norway for a year to study under figurative painter Odd Nerdrum, who taught her the classical technique of beginning a portrait by modeling the figure in grisaille (a method of painting in monochrome, usually gray, for a three-dimensional effect). Experimenting with the technique allowed Sherald to achieve her signature style. To this day, Sherald continues to use this method, sometimes then going over the grisaille with hues appropriate to the sitter’s skin tone, and sometimes leaving the grisaille as is.
On October 12, 2012, Sherald fainted in front of a pharmacy and was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Two months later she received a heart transplant, and spent most of 2013 in recovery.
Mature Period
Sherald had had modest success as a portrait painter, but everything changed for her when, in 2016, her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) beat out over 2,500 other entires to win the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which came with a $25,000 prize. Following this breakthrough, she was selected to paint former First Lady Michelle Obama’s portrait, which further cemented her reputation. These successes gave Sherald a financial cushion and allowed her to quit waitressing, pay off her student loans, take her mom to Barbados for her birthday, and comfortably afford the thirteen medications she needed to take daily. In 2018 she held her first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, received mural commissions in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and was awarded the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Prize. That same year, she moved to New Jersey, where she lives with her partner Kevin Pemberton. She works out of a studio at Mana Contemporary, a former tobacco factory converted into artist spaces. She produces around thirteen paintings per year.
The Legacy of Amy Sherald
Though still young, Amy Sherald has made great strides in carrying on the legacies of preceding generations of Black American artists who have taken control of the visual representation of their community and culture. Her portraits subverted how Black subjects had traditionally been portrayed in Western art (when they were portrayed at all) as inferior and uncivilized. Instead, Sherald’s works contribute to the depiction of everyday Black people, while also bringing out her subjects’ uniqueness. She makes them relatable to contemporary audiences without falling into popular culture’s stereotypes of Black bodies. She uses the genre of portraiture to present multiple, nuanced images of what it means to be Black in America today, and her achievements as a Black portraitist has paved the way for future Black artists, such as Devan Shimoyama, to enter the fine art arena.
By painting only Black subjects and cultivating an audience in the art world, Sherald’s artworks have in effect made more Black faces visible in some of the nation’s most important art institutions. In this way, more Black youth can recognize themselves in the artworks on the museums’ walls, and not feel excluded by these institutional spaces. Says Sherald, “I think the power is that there are kids who, after seeing Michelle Obama’s portrait, are now interested in the arts. I went to an elementary school to surprise a group of kids, and you would’ve thought I was JAY-Z. And that’s very symbolic. I don’t play basketball, I’m not a rapper, and these kids were beside themselves.”