“I made this promise to myself 10 years ago, to always try to remember to find the moon,” Amy Sherald tells me on a bright morning in July. Sherald is calling me from a bright gallery space, apt for one of the premier portrait artists of our time. She is dressed in a crisp white blouse, her oversize square glasses balanced precisely on her nose: the uniform of an artist. (“I’m a Virgo and I like uniforms,” she will explain later. “Maybe all Virgos like uniforms.”) “I walk my dogs at nighttime and just take a moment every day to see if I can find the moon to connect myself to the universe, not forget that I’m a part of a bigger picture—I’m a small part in this big universe. It helps me keep things in perspective.”
Perspective is a good word to describe Sherald’s work. Her portraits are among some of the most iconic pieces of American visual art of the past quarter century. Already a star in the art world, Sherald became a household name in 2017, when she was tapped to create First Lady Michelle Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. When the portrait was unveiled a year later, it was an instant sensation.
In Sherald’s work, the first lady sits with her chin on her hand, hair styled in a silk press that flows down her back, against a delicate blue backdrop that is one of Sherald’s signatures. Michelle Obama was ruthlessly scrutinized during her husband’s presidency—every outfit choice and hairstyle pored over for intent and what it might mean for America’s violent relationship to Blackness and womanhood. Sherald’s portrait resonated because Obama appears above the fray, completely herself, her pose soft but her expression proud, a woman in command of herself. In the age of image saturation, the painting broke through. An exhibition featuring the portrait, alongside Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama, became a blockbuster show, selling out at museums across the country.
Six years later, in this age of AI and its trickeries, it can often seem like we are facing a future in which we cannot trust our own eyes to reveal anything close to truth or beauty. Sherald’s work, though, defies all of that doom and gloom. In a culture steeped in mimicry and memification, her portraits—of Black American delight, often against a background of that same pacific blue—have a visual language entirely their own. And most remarkable of all, she has managed to permeate the culture not with images of violence or the grotesque but of leisure, of rest, of peace.
In 2020, Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, originally commissioned for an issue of Vanity Fair guest-edited by her longtime friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, also went viral. Most of the discourse had reduced Taylor, the young Black woman from Kentucky murdered by police in her home during a no-knock raid, to a talking point or a case study. Sherald’s painting reminds the viewer that Breonna Taylor was neither of those things, was a full life, taken from this world unjustly, a consciousness that existed and exists outside the narrow and dehumanizing confines of our time. In the painting, Taylor stands against that same expansive blue, which opens behind her like a promise of that space Black Americans have sung about since we were forced to come to this country in chains, that place that exists o’er our heads, where there’s music in the air, where there must be a God somewhere.
“I was raised Christian,” Sherald tells me. “I’m no longer religious. But you talk about the flesh and the spirit in religion, right? I feel like art takes us back to the spirit which takes us back to our humanity. Otherwise, we’re in our flesh and we’re reactive,” she says. “There is no evolution in reaction. Take the verb out of your life, take the verb out of your everyday actions and just be…. Art offers us these moments of stillness and reflection that we need in times that are like the times that we’re living in.”
Sherald’s subjects are always Black people and she chooses to paint their skin with a grayish cast, using a technique called grisaille, in which the figure is modeled first in black and white paint. As a result, the subjects of her paintings often look as though they have appeared from a newsreel or a family album, transposed into the vibrant colors and playful scenes she creates. “Amy has always shown a real vulnerability, real openness. The way that her labor functions, the slowness of her projects are in many ways almost antithetical to mine. She’s also really equipped and curious,” says her friend and fellow artist Rashid Johnson.
“What I find compelling about Amy’s work is its ability to be both deeply intimate but also incredibly universal, and the way in which she is able to move between those two positions,” says Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “Amy is an example of an artist who’s worked for a long time with a very deep and profound sense of mission about what she’s doing.”
Born in 1973 to a Black middle-class family in Columbus, Georgia, Sherald attended a predominantly white school in her town through high school, before enrolling at a historically Black college, Clark Atlanta University. It’s perhaps this classic experience of double-consciousness that informs her subject matter. “Figuration is important because it’s a definite mark and a stamp that I was here, in a narrative that was absent of our presence,” Sherald says. “I remember when I was early on in my practice, I was using literal costumes as I was trying to figure out what exactly it was that I was doing and how I wanted to portray Black Americans. I knew at that time that I just did not want the work to be marginalized. I was looking for that fantastical narrative.”
While at Clark Atlanta, Sherald took additional painting classes at Spelman College, eventually abandoning her parents’ preferred career path in medicine to become an artist. Sherald studied for decades before becoming a sensation, working as a waiter until she was nearly 40, honing her craft. Now, at 50, she has based her practice in New York City.
Visual artist Deborah Roberts, whom Sherald considers a close friend, followed a similar career path. The two met at the Black Artists Retreat, an annual event hosted by Chicago artist Theaster Gates. “Amy is the perfect person whom I can call when I’m having an issue in the art world and vice versa,” Roberts says. “Success discovered us in life later than most artists. I think we’ve risen to the challenge of what it takes to be a professional artist working today. Our friendship allows us the freedom and the security to express those things when we’re in doubt. Everyone needs a safe space.”
This November, Sherald will be the subject of her first major museum survey, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One of the focal points of the show is For Love, and for Country, a painting of two dark-skinned Black men, sailors, in a passionate embrace against a deep blue background. The men are locked in the same pose as the famous photograph of a Navy man kissing a woman in a white uniform in Times Square the day Allied forces defeated fascism and ended World War II.
Sherald’s painting is unabashedly romantic; the kiss is cinematic and, because it is between two men, draws on the hidden intimacies of queer love, now out in the open. It’s a declaration of independence for a better country than our own, one that is freer and more peaceful—a place Sherald shows us glimpses of in every painting. “I think I have to make work for me,” she says. “I like to know that I’m in the canon. But other than that, I come in my space and I go inside and I make what’s important to me.”
Hair: Joey George for Oribe; makeup: Janessa Paré for Chantecaille; manicures: Honey for Un/Dn Laqr; production: Block Productions; set design: Kadu Lennox.
