Amy Sherald
First Black Woman to Complete a Presidential Portrait
Portrait of artist Amy Sherald adapted from a photo courtesy of the New York Times.
Amy Sherald, a New York-based portrait artist, renders her subjects in grayscale—during moments of leisure—and offers pops of color in clothing and accessories against vibrant, often solid backgrounds. Her portraits—which always feature black Americans directing piercing stares at the viewer—have made their way to notable public collections. Among many other galleries, they are on view at three preeminent Washington, D.C. institutions: the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art and Culture, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery. After former First Lady Michelle Obama handpicked Sherald, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned Sherald and Kehinde Wiley to paint official portraits of the Obamas.
Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, on August 30, 1973. Her parents are Amos P. Sherald III, a dentist, and Geraldine W. Sherald, a homemaker. Early in her childhood, Sherald developed an interest in art and often sketched on her writing assignments. In a Baltimore Sun interview, Sherald said:
“When I started school. I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I’d draw it.”
Amy Sherald in her studio with a Breonna Taylor painting she completed for the cover of Vanity Fair.
While she was interested in art, Sherald never realized that it could be a career. A school field trip to the Columbus Museum was revelatory. She encountered artist Bo Bartlett’s large oil on linen painting, Object Permanence, and marveled when she saw a man who bore her skin color standing in a front yard returning her gaze. Sherald admits that she saw her future in that painting, and from that day on, she desired to paint large beautiful portraits that told the story of her people.
Sherald’s parents wanted her to pursue a safe career, so they steered her toward medicine and away from art. But her mother’s objection was the stronger of the two, which Sherald says fueled her passion for art all the more. Sherald became aware of her ethnicity in her youth, having attended schools populated by Southern whites. Her experiences later influenced her artwork, as did entries from the 1900 Paris Exposition that featured nineteenth- and twentieth-century black and white photographs of black people presented by W.E.B. Du Bois.
With that, Sherald created over 40 pieces of art featuring blacks with skin tones painted in grayscale, which she employs to challenge notions of race. She rose to prominence in 2016 with her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). The portrait won Sherald the grand prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, marking the first time both a woman and black American did so since the inaugural event in 2006. In another two years, her portrait of Michelle Obama went viral after being unveiled at the same gallery, catapulting her to greater fame. Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley’s extraordinary paintings boosted attendance to the National Portrait Gallery by 300 percent, with a line of waiting patrons stretching out of the gallery to a stairwell and out to the courtyard. Despite years of hardship derived from financial issues and poor health suffered by family and herself, including the deaths of loved ones, Sherald’s perseverance eventually brought success.
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Kehinde Wiley is a highly regarded portrait painter known for his naturalistic paintings of black American men in heroic poses. Barack Obama chose Wiley to paint his presidential portrait.