Amy Sherald: The Greatest Inspiration
Amy Sherald employs the canvas to document African American experiences in the USA. Her monumental portraits invite the viewers to debate the notion of race, color, and culture. She is best known for vibrant figurative paintings of African American people rendered in intriguing grayscale skin tones that challenge the idea of discrimination based on skin color. Read on to learn more about Amy Sherald and her captivating work.
Early Life & Education
Born in 1973 to Dentist parents, Amy Sherald developed an early interest in arts. As a young child in school, she often ended sentences with a small drawing and stayed behind during recess to draw.
However, it wasn't until she went on a school trip to the Columbus Museum and saw Bo Bartlett's "Object Permanence" that included a black man that she realized art could become a profession and way of expression. Coming from a family of doctors, Amy Sherald's parents did not see eye to eye with her on her love and passion for arts. Instead, they wanted her to pursue a career in medicine.
Reminiscing about the time in an interview, Amy shared, "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."
Amy enrolled at Clark Atlanta University as a pre-med track as her parents wish, but cross-registered for painting classes at Spelman College as a sophomore student. She graduated with a degree in arts in 1997 and then went on to obtain the Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the MICA.
She is well-traveled. She completed her residency with the Norwegian painter, Odd Nerdum. Furthermore, she opted for additional residencies in Beijing and Oranjestad. Over the years, she has bagged many achievements and awards. Today, she is one of the most highly renowned African American artists of the century.
Notable Works & Achievements
Amy Sherald has a long list of achievements to her name. However, she came to prominence when her painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016, making her the first woman and African American to win the award. She received prize money of $25,000 and worldwide fame. The same year, the former First Lady, Michelle Obama, chose her to do her official portrait for the National Portrait. The portrait was her first commissioned project, and she took her signature grayscale skin tone approach to create an intriguing image on the canvas.
The completed painting was unveiled in 2018. As expected, it received some criticism for the bold choice of skin color. However, Obama loved the painting and its simplicity.
Apart from these two significant achievements, Amy Sherald has received public acclaim. She had a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2018 and received a commissioned mural in Philadelphia. Some of her work is installed in the Parkway Theater in Baltimore, while the original painting resides in the US Embassy's permanent collection. The same year, she also received the High Museum of Art's David C. Driskell Prize.
In 2019, her solo exhibition, featuring eight oil portraits, in NYC took the art world by storm. In 2020, she painted the portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of the September Issue of Vanity Fair. She also had an exhibition portraying five Black women. On December 7, 2020, one of her works, The Bathers, fetched the price of $4,265,000 at the Phillips' Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art.
