Art Fact Friday #28 Amy Sherald
- William Mandela Matthews
- Feb 2, 2024
- 2 min read
The artist best known for the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama and for a 2020, Vanity Fair cover featuring murder victim Breonna Taylor. The artist success elevated with the painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) beating over 2,500 others for the National Portrait Gallery's: Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. By contributing to the depiction of everyday Black people, the artist carry’s the legacy of Black American artists controlling the visual representation of community and culture. The artists uses portraiture to display a multitude of nuanced images of Black life in America today. Critics feel the artist style invites the viewer to contemplate the inner lives of the subjects. This artisit uses grayscale to paint skin tones, challenging the concept of color-as-race. In 2020 the artist painting The Bathers sold for $4,265,000, 30 times the estimate before auction. The artist exhibited at Art Basel Miami and in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Born in 1973 in Columbus, Georgia, Amy Sherald attended Clark-Atlanta University . Sherald participated in a residency at Maine College of Art Portland,1996. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1997 at Clark-Atlanta University. Sherald also apprenticed with Dr. Arturo Lindsay at Spelman College. In addition Sherald received, Spelman College’s International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama. She immersed herself in the Panama art scene working as curator, organizing shows for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo as well as the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru.
Sherald earned her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, 2004 and shifted her attention to critiquing the representation of the African American body, cultural and history. Sherald then studied under Odd Nerdrum, who taught her the technique of beginning portraits in grisaille. This technique gave way to Sherald’s signature style.
Sherald became the first woman as well as the first African American to win the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). In 2018 Sherald painted the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery. The artist also, received mural commissions in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In addition she was awarded the 2018 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum Art in Atlanta. Also in 2018 she held her first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
In 2020, Sherald painted Breonna Taylor's portrait for Vanity Fair. The painting was jointly acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. In 2021, Welfare Queen (2012), sold for $3.9M at Phillips New York auction. In 2021, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from MICA. In 2022 to established two grant programs in Breonna Taylor’s name, by giving $1 million to the University of Louisville from the sale of the portrait.
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