NEW YORK, NY.- Hauser & Wirth announced its exclusive worldwide representation of American artist Amy Sherald.
Based in Baltimore MD, Sherald documents contemporary African-American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly portraits, often working from photographs of strangers she encounters on the streets. Drawing loosely upon the American Realist tradition, Sherald subverts the medium of portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives, welcoming viewers into a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and situating black heritage centrally in the story of American art. While her subjects are always African-American, Sherald renders their skin-tone exclusively in grisaille – an absence of color that directly challenges perceptions of black identity and seeks, in the artist’s words, ‘to exclude the idea of color as race.’ In compositions that are carefully controlled and meticulously considered, Sherald sets her subjects free.
Sherald was the first woman and first African-American ever to receive first prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; in February 2018, the museum unveiled her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Sherald has also received the 2018 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta GA, and is the second recipient in 2018 of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity. In May 2018, she will present a solo exhibition of her portraits at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis MO.
Hauser & Wirth will hold its first exhibition with Sherald in New York in 2019.
‘We are thrilled and honored to welcome Amy Sherald into Hauser & Wirth’s family of artists,’ said Marc Payot, Vice President and Partner, Hauser & Wirth. ‘As a gallery, we aspire to represent an ever more diverse range of voices and visions. Amy’s distinctive approach to both painterly traditions and urgent issues of contemporary identity make her one of the most powerful new voices in American art today. Her work foregrounds and celebrates life experiences that are too often relegated to the margins of mainstream discourse, while exploring formal territory that bridges portraiture and abstraction. Along with gallery artists Mark Bradford, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, and the late Jack Whitten, her remarkable work is effectively expanding, enriching, and accurately reflecting the real story of American history and art history.’
Among her influences, Sherald has cited photographs that author, philosopher, and historian W.E.B. Du Bois compiled to be displayed at the Paris Exposition in 1900, depicting African-American men, women, and children in ways that countered discriminatory representations of the day. ‘I wanted to emulate the quiet presence I saw in those pictures, which were some of the first images where blacks were able to present themselves the way they wanted to be seen,’ Sherald has said. ‘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.’
Sherald’s subjects are offset against a vibrant palette: eye-popping clothes and ephemera float in tension against abstracted backgrounds. The spackled textures of these monochrome pastel grounds are not confined to any specific time or space, but seem to exist beyond the facts of recorded history and national borders. She defines the subjects of her portraits simply as ‘Americans,’ affirming blackness as naturally integral to American identity. The individuals in her paintings are deliberately posed, dramatically staged, and assertive in gaze. Their expressiveness, and the variations in their gestures, clothing, and emotional auras reinforce the complex multiplicities of African-American existence. But the persistent sense of privacy and mystery maintained in Sherald’s work requires viewers to ponder the thoughts and dreams of the black men and women she has depicted.
In what she describes as her ‘conceptual portraits,’ Sherald explores the intersecting histories of European and African civilization, incorporating tropes from antiquated European pursuits and rituals into her portraits of contemporary black Americans. She implies propriety through subtle gestures, such as a lifted little finger in the manner of an aristocratic lady drinking in ‘Grande Dame Queenie’ (2012); or the teacup in the same painting featuring a subverted royal cameo, rendered here with a black profile silhouette, a detail that re-situates racial identity within colonial history. These visual clues and suggest the entire historical experience is to be considered within each unique portrait.
Born in Columbus GA in 1973, Sherald lives and works in Baltimore MD. She graduated with a BA in Painting from Clark-Atlanta University in 1997 and became an apprentice to Dr. Arturo Lindsay, Professor of Art History at Spelman College. She was also a part of the Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama.
Alongside the pursuit of a painterly practice, Sherald devoted almost two decades to socially committed creative initiatives, including teaching art in prisons and art projects with teenagers. Sherald achieved an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. She returned to painting full-time at age 39 and critical success quickly followed.
Sherald has been featured in prominent survey exhibitions and publications such as ‘New American Paintings’ (2010) and ‘Fictions’ at Studio Museum in Harlem NY (2017 – 2018). Her work is featured in numerous public collections in the United States and further afield, including: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO; The Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham NC; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Smithsonian National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; United States Embassy Dakar, Senegal; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus GA; and FTI Technologies Inc., Baltimore MD.
Sherald is a member of the board of trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
