Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald (born August 30, 1973, Columbus, Georgia, U.S.) is an American artist who gained fame for her portrait of former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama (2018), which was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. She has also received acclaim for redefining contemporary portraiture through her monumental paintings of Black Americans. Sherald notably renders the skin of her sitters in grisaille, a centuries-old technique that builds three-dimensional form through the use of limited colors, usually from the gray scale. She has described her use of grisaille as a way of shifting attention from racial categorization to the individuality of her subjects.

Early life

Sherald is the third of four children of Amos P. Sherald III, a dentist, and Geraldine W. Sherald, a homemaker. When Amy Sherald was seven, her father was diagnosed with Parkinson disease, and he gave up his practice. “We were doing well, and then we were not doing well, because there was no money,” she recollected in an interview with Vogue in 2019. Her mother took a job as a bank manager, and Amy Sherald assumed some of the housekeeping tasks and the caretaking of her younger brother, Michael Sherald. In her free time she made art.

Education

Despite Sherald’s interest in becoming an artist, she entered Clark Atlanta University as a premed student at the encouragement of her parents. By her sophomore year, however, she had switched to art. Sherald graduated with a B.A. in painting in 1997 and eventually moved to Baltimore, where she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art under Abstract Expressionist Grace Hartigan. After receiving an M.F.A. in 2004, she took part in residencies in such places as Norway, China, and Aruba.

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Early work

In the late 2000s Sherald was splitting her time painting and waiting tables when she came across a compilation of photographs depicting African Americans that had been collected by W.E.B. Du Bois. “They have this stillness and dignity,” she recalled in an interview for Baltimore magazine in 2016. “I wanted to emulate the quiet presence I saw in those pictures, which were some of the first images where [Black Americans] were able to present themselves the way they wanted to be seen. Painting images that look like that was really important, not just for ourselves, but for the rest of the world to see us that way, too.”

The poise and calm Sherald described can be seen in Well Prepared and Maladjusted (2008), the painting she characterizes as her first successful work. Indeed, the portrait of a young woman standing still with her arms at her sides shows many of the characteristics Sherald eventually became known for. The woman’s skin is painted using grisaille, her expression is inscrutable but calm, her blouse is saturated with color and patterned, and the background is almost monochrome. The portrait also includes the discordant element of an oversize ruffled knot tied at the woman’s neck.

Heart transplant and breakthrough

Although Sherald had found her style, her art career was marked by significant health challenges. In 2004, while in graduate school, Sherald had been diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a cardiac disease that results in heart failure due to a decrease in the organ’s pumping power. In 2012 she underwent a heart transplant, and four years later she finally achieved a breakthrough in her art career. The National Portrait Gallery awarded her first prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, making her the first woman and first African American to win. Sherald’s submission, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013), depicts a young woman primly dressed in a navy dress with polka dots, a red frilly fascinator, and white gloves while decorously holding an absurdly large teacup and saucer. One of the jurors of the competition, Helen Molesworth, then the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, observed that the painting “really stood out.…It’s a very realistic painting in one way, yet the details are all quite surreal.” The first place award came with $25,000 and a commission to produce a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection.

Michelle Obama

In 2017 Sherald received the National Portrait Gallery’s commission, which turned out to be a painting of Michelle Obama, who had handpicked the artist to create her official portrait for the museum. The work was unveiled the following year alongside American artist Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of former U.S. president Barack Obama. Both paintings caused a stir, partly because they were the first representations of African Americans and the first artworks by Black artists in the presidential portrait collection but also because of their striking interpretations of the staid first family portrait. The Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott wrote that both artists “managed to create compelling likenesses without sacrificing key aspects of their signature styles.”

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Sherald’s Michelle Obama is painted with the artist’s trademark grisaille, and the sitter wears a black-and-white patterned gown by American designer Michelle Smith. A few geometric shapes in the mountainous skirt provide pops of saturated color that reminded Sherald of Piet Mondrian’s paintings and the quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Obama sits with her chin resting on her hand, her expression calm, confident, and somewhat skeptical. A few critics admitted to feeling underwhelmed by the portrait. “In some ways,” Kennicott remarked to CNN, “[Obama] retreat[s] into the expanse of the dress.” Social media users complained that the portrait does not resemble the first lady. Nonetheless, the public clamored to see both paintings. Attendance to the museum increased by one million visitors in the first year of the paintings’ display. Eventually, the National Portrait Gallery moved Sherald’s painting to a larger space to accommodate the crowds. Both pieces traveled the country between 2021 and 2022.

Artistic process

The Obama portrait vaulted Sherald to celebrity, but portraying the likeness of a prominent figure was a departure for the artist. Her customary portrait practice does not focus on depicting a specific person but rather an archetype. She usually paints ordinary individuals whom she has encountered on the street, on the subway, or in another public space and who have agreed to have her dress them in outfits from their closets or from hers and to be photographed. Sherald then translates the photographs into crisply edged compositions against saturated, often single-color grounds, and she sometimes adds a make-believe element. Occasionally, she paints a few individuals in one scene, such as Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019) or As American as Apple Pie (2020). Yet, while a figure may sit on another figure’s shoulders or hold another sitter’s hands, the subjects are rarely in communion with one another. Like the single portraits, they tend to look straight ahead, engaging more with the viewer than each other.

Breonna Taylor

In 2020 Sherald again broke from her process when American author Ta-Nehisi Coates commissioned her to paint a portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair’s September issue, which he guest-edited. Taylor was an African American emergency medical technician who was shot and killed in March 2020 by police officers during a botched raid of her home in Louisville, Kentucky. Her murder was one of the drivers of the large-scale demonstrations held in the United States that year against police brutality and racial injustice. Sherald recreated her subject from photographs, conversations with Taylor’s family and friends, and her own imagination. She dressed Taylor in a gown designed by American fashion designer Jasmine Elder, painting it and the background aquamarine. “The color that I chose almost had a resplendence to it,” she told Vanity Fair that year. “The monochromatic color allows you to really focus on her face. The whole painting really becomes about her.” Sherald wanted the work to remain in the public sphere, and the piece was jointly acquired in 2021 by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville.

Exhibitions and market

Sherald’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Stone Center for Black Culture and History (2011) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture (2013) in Baltimore, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018). Beginning in 2024, a mid-career retrospective, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” traveled from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and then to the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition was originally intended to culminate at the National Portrait Gallery, but in 2025 Sherald canceled that leg of the tour, citing censorship concerns. The museum worried that one of the paintings, Trans Forming Liberty (2024), depicting a Black transgender woman in the pose of the Statue of Liberty, might draw negative attention from U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. His administration had been scrutinizing the Smithsonian since the president issued an executive order earlier in 2025 to remove “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums. The Baltimore Museum of Art stepped in to host the show instead, reaffirming Sherald’s long-standing ties to the city where she lived and worked for many years. Market enthusiasm for Sherald has paralleled institutional acclaim; in 2020 her double portrait The Bathers set a record for the artist at auction, selling for $4.27 million at Phillips.