Amy Sherald

The choice as well as her process echoed and was reinforced by 19th- and 20th-century black-and-white photographic portraits, especially W.E.B. DuBois's black and white photographs of black people in the 1900 Paris Exposition, which at the time sharply contrasted with other exhibitions' sensationalized displays of black bodies.

Sherald said in a round table: "When I finally came across the black-and-white photography, I realized that I was setting these people up and recreating that same kind of quietness and dignity that I saw in these photographs that Black families were having taken of them. I just recognized my work inside of these photographs and started to go further.".

Critics have commented on the way this style invites the viewer to contemplate the inner lives of Sherald's subjects.

Sherald has said her mother's opposition increased her determination: "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."

Sherald's upbringing also influenced the specific themes of interest to Sherald in her painting career.

Attending school in a predominantly white area of the South, she was often one of few African American students in her class.

Her position was further complicated by her light-colored hair and skin.

The experience made Sherald conscious of race from an early age, as well as the related social cues, again informed by her mother: "'You're different from everybody else [...] You need to speak a certain way and act a certain way.' That's what my mom told me on the first day of school."

Especially looking back on her upbringing from her postgraduate vantage point, Sherald felt black life in the South was often reduced to a singular narrative and sought to make paintings that created new, alternative narratives about African American life.

Sherald is a graduate of St. Anne-Pacelli Catholic School in Columbus.

She enrolled at Clark Atlanta University, where Sherald began college on the pre-med track her parents hoped for, but as a sophomore cross-registered for a painting class at Spelman College, which introduced Sherald to Panama-born artist and art historian Arturo Lindsay, whose work focuses on the African influence on the cultures of the Americas.

Amy Sherald (born August 30, 1973) is an American painter.

She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings.

Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects.

Sherald was born on August 30, 1973, in Columbus, Georgia, to dentist Amos P. Sherald III and Geraldine W. Sherald.

As a schoolchild, Sherald had an early interest in art, staying from recess to draw and often adding images to the ends of sentences, depicting whatever she was writing about—a house, a flower, a bird.

Despite this interest, it came as a shock to Sherald, on her first and only school field trip to a museum, to realize art could be a profession.

In particular, the trip to the Columbus Museum allowed her to see Object Permanence, a painting by realistic portrait artist Bo Bartlett that included the image of a black man.

Seeing her own world reflected in the halls of the museum world was transforming: "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 [art] 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."Notwithstanding this revelatory experience, Sherald's parents wanted her career to be in medicine, and discouraged her from pursuing art.

Sherald graduated with a B.A. degree in painting in 1997 from Clark Atlanta University.

After an apprenticeship with Lindsay, painting for free for five years.

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.

Sherald attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, 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 also convinced Odd Nerdrum to mentor her in Norway.

In 2021, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from MICA.

Spending much of her career based in Baltimore, Sherald 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.

Sherald has been highly motivated as an artist, wanting to be a painter so badly that she waited tables until she was 38.

She has taught art in the Baltimore City Detention Center, and in 2008 she did a residency the Tongxian Art Center in Beijing, China.

Since 2008, Sherald has painted a little over 30 pieces of art.

Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.

Since her 2012 work Equilibrium, Sherald has depicted the skin tone of her Black subjects in grayscale rather than flesh tones.

Sherald uses the gray hues to challenge an idea of race where skin color automatically assigns a category, part of a broader project to counter what she experienced as the limited narrative available to her growing up in segregated Columbus, Georgia, only shortly after the Civil Rights Movement.

In 2016, Sherald became the first woman as well as the first African American ever to win the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).

The next year, she and Kehinde Wiley were selected by former President Barack Obama (Wiley) and former First Lady Michelle Obama (Sherald) to paint their official portraits, becoming the first African Americans ever to receive presidential portrait commissions from the National Portrait Gallery.

The portraits were unveiled together in 2018 and have significantly increased attendance at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

In December 2020, her piece The Bathers (2015) was sold at auction for $4,265,000, nearly 30 times the presale estimate.

On November 17, 2021, Welfare Queen (2012), sold for $3.9M in a Phillips New York auction and brought to light the need for more governance around resale royalties for artists.