Amy Sherald

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. 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.

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

In December 2020, Sherald's piece The Bathers (2015) was sold at auction for $4.265 million, nearly 30 times the pre-sale estimate. On November 17, 2021, Welfare Queen (2012) sold for $3.9 million in a Phillips New York auction and brought to light the need for more governance around resale royalties for artists.

Early life Sherald was born on August 30, 1973, in Columbus, Georgia, United States, to dentist Amos P. Sherald III and Geraldine W. Sherald. Her great-grandfather was a German Jewish tailor, and the family belonged to the all-white Worldwide Church of God, celebrating the Sabbath on Friday night, honoring Old Testament holidays such as Passover, and dispensing with Christmas and Easter. As a schoolchild, Sherald had an early interest in art, staying in during recess to draw Despite this interest, it came as a shock to Sherald, on her first and only school field trip to a museum, to realize that 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: Not withstanding this revelatory experience, Sherald's parents wanted her career to be in medicine, and discouraged her from pursuing art.

Sherald's upbringing also influenced the specific themes of interest to her 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, She enrolled at Clark Atlanta University, where she 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 her to Panama-born artist and art historian Arturo Lindsay, whose work focuses on the African influence on the cultures of the Americas. painting for free for five years.

Career Early career

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. 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 her 2012 work Equilibrium, Sherald has depicted the skin tone of her Black subjects in grayscale rather than flesh tones. For Sherald, this kind of work only feels possible because of a preceding generation of artists who made what she calls more "didactic" work, explaining Blackness to an audience that sometimes had little awareness.

Outwin Boochever prize Sherald came to prominence in 2016 when her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) won the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition along with a $25,000 award. The competition noted that "Sherald creates innovative, dynamic portraits that, through color and form, confront the psychological effects of stereotypical imagery on African-American subjects". She was the first woman and first African American to win the competition. Sherald's Miss Everything was selected among 2,500 other entries.

First Lady portrait

The year after Sherald won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, she was chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery. Obama recounted an immediate connection upon meeting Sherald, One commentator noted the similarity to fashion designed by Klimt's muse Emilie Louise Flöge.

National Portrait Gallery visitors view First Lady Michelle Obama.

Unveiled in 2018, Sherald's portrait and Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama made them the first African-American artists to make official presidential portraits at the National Portrait Gallery; notably, they both were also artists who early on prioritized African-American portraiture. Holland Cotter noted in a review that they also both blend fact and fiction in their portraiture. The portraits drew high numbers of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery. including that it was less formal than many had expected or "Why is she gray? ...It doesn't look like her." Sherald summarized her response: "Some people like their poetry to rhyme. Some people don't." to depict Obama's skin, feeling photo-realism was a "dead end" and wanting to encourage the viewer to see Obama in her entirety as a person rather than solely as her racial identity. Writing about the painting, critic Doreen St. Félix said "lack of brown skin may at first feel like a loss, but soon becomes a real gain". The portrait reflects the shared sense that people could relate to the former First Lady, in its simplicity, while also referring to the way others looked up to her.

Asked about the pressure of this painting, Sherald said she was initially anxious because of the emotion invested in the Obama family globally, but realized there were millions of people she might not be able to please. Ultimately, she felt satisfied that Michelle Obama loved it.

Subsequent work Since the Boochever prize and the Obama commission, Sherald has received considerable public acclaim. In 2018, she had her first museum solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and received a mural commission in Philadelphia. The project was funded through the 2014 Transformative Art Prize grant, an initiative that installs public artworks in underused public places in Baltimore. The original painting is in the permanent collection of the Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal.

Sherald's solo exhibition titled the heart of the matter... took place in fall 2019 at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City. Sherald's gallery, Hauser, described this effect produced by the grayscale as "requir[ing the viewer] to meet the artist's subjects actively and to 'negotiate' their own conceived notions of Black American life." These show black women focusing on different forms of leisure activities.

Breonna Taylor portrait In 2020, Sherald painted Breonna Taylor's portrait on the September cover of Vanity Fair. After the 26-year-old medical worker was shot and killed by Louisville police officers in her apartment in March, Taylor's case received nationwide attention and fueled demonstrations throughout the world, along with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Sherald created this image of Taylor with her signature gray-scale skin coloring, along with a free-flowing blue dress against an aqua background. Sherald told Vanity Fair: "[Taylor] sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong! I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice. It was featured in the Speed Art Museum's exhibit Promise, Witness, Remembrance honoring the life of Breonna Taylor in 2021.

From the sale of the portrait, Sherald gave $1 million to the University of Louisville in 2022 to establish two grant programs in Breonna Taylor's name.

Trans Forming Liberty

In 2024, Sherald painted a depiction of the Statue of Liberty modeled after black transgender artist Arewa Basit, entitled Trans Forming Liberty.

In July 2025, Sherald withdrew her solo show American Sublime from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery after the gallery discussed removing the portrait from the show in response to internal concerns about provoking President Donald Trump. The gallery had proposed replacing the portrait with a video display of people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues, but according to Sherald the video had included anti-trans rhetoric, and so she rejected it.

The New Yorker magazine used Trans Forming Liberty as its cover of the August 11, 2025, issue. This was the second time Sherald's work had been used on a New Yorker cover; her first cover was Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) in the March 24, 2025, issue.

On September 3, 2025, it was announced that American Sublime would be exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2 November–5 April 2026). Sherald was awarded its Artist Who Inspires Award at the BMA Ball 2025 on November 22, 2025. In February 2026, American Sublime set a new attendance record at the museum.

At the High Museum of Art's David Driskell Prize gala on September 20, 2025, director Rand Suffolk announced that American Sublime would be exhibited at the High 15 May–27 September 2026.

Art market

On December 7, 2020, Sherald's piece The Bathers (2015) sold for $4,265,000 at the Phillips' Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. This exceeded the pre-sale estimate ($150,000–200,000) nearly 30 times over.

Personal life Sherald's father died of Parkinson's disease in 2000, and her aunt developed a brain infection around the same time. Before her transplant, Sherald's artistic career was also put on pause when she had to care for an ill family member.

Political activism Ahead of the 2024 United States presidential election, Sherald was one of 165 leading contemporary artists who contributed pieces to Artists for Kamala, an online sale with all proceeds raised going directly to the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.

The show Amy Sherald: American Sublime was due to be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery from 19 September 2025 to 22 February 2026; on July 24, 2025, Sherald announced that the show would not travel there "... after representatives of the museum allegedly suggested removing a portrait of a non-binary transgender person posing as the Statue of Liberty to avoid falling afoul of US president Donald Trump's crusade against trans identity."

Exhibitions 2011: The Magical Realism of Amy Sherald, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2013: Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, Baltimore, Maryland 2016: The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. 2018: Amy Sherald, Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri 2018: Amy Sherald, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas 2019: Amy Sherald, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia 2019: Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter..., Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY 2020: Womanist is to Feminist as Purple is to Lavender, Hauser & Wirth, NY 2024: Amy Sherald: American Sublime (retrospective), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 16 November 2024–9 March 2025; Whitney Museum of Art, 9 April–10 August 2025. The show was due to travel to the National Portrait Gallery but was canceled by Sherald. The Baltimore Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal FTI Technologies Inc., Baltimore, Maryland Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina