JERSEY CITY, NJ.- A painter of luminous figurative compositions, Amy Sherald thinks like a filmmaker. When I visited her Jersey City, New Jersey, studio this summer, she put it plainly: “I’m directing in the paintings.”
Sherald became famous after her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama was unveiled in 2018. Attention grew with Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, the Black medical worker who was killed in 2020 by police in Louisville, Kentucky, during a raid on her home. It remains one of the best known pictures of protest and resilience to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But Sherald’s reputation as a portrait painter is misleading. In fact, she almost always invents her subjects. The work begins, she explained, with finding sitters — actors, really — to support characters and stories of her own devising. Her subjects, all Black, are friends, strangers and, lately, people found through casting agents, whom she clothes and poses (often amid props), then submits to hundreds of photographs. In the paintings that result, they generally gaze straight out at the viewer and establish a commanding silence.
Sherald, dressed casually in loose gray pants and a black top when I visited her, borrowed fashion-forward clothing for the lively (and slightly risque) images of herself accompanying this article. At this point in her life — Sherald just turned 51 — she’s delighted to “rid myself of the critical self I grew up with,” and to reconnect with her inner child. “Let me reintroduce myself,” Sherald wants the photos to say. “This is me being happy.”
Her optimism is rare and sails against the winds of contemporary culture. It is evident in her current work. So, too, are deeper overtones. Both will be fully on view in Sherald’s most comprehensive survey to date, opening Nov. 16 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York next year. Greeting visitors will be her new painting “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” which she has been working on all summer. A triptych, her first, it features a single figure per panel, each framed by a kind of watchtower set against an azure sky. The first word of the title in Greek means “assembly”; more commonly, it’s the root for church, a connection emphasized by the panels’ rounded tops, which evoke ecclesiastic architecture.
All three figures — two women and one man — search the horizon, one dangling a white cloth, another shading her face with her hand. Two find our eyes as they scan the scene before them. From left to right, they wear a shirt emblazoned with a sunrise, a knitted green vest patterned with clouds and raindrops, and a rainbow-striped top. Weather vanes with marine animals — a tortoise, a whale and a dolphin — sit on the peaked roofs. All these details seem carefully chosen.
Sherald says everything she does “is really intuitive and emotional.” Of the watchtowers, she mused, “In my mind, they’re over water and maybe they’re looking out to the ancestors.” Explaining that “Ecclesia” involves windows within towers, and eyes within those apertures — perhaps, she says, windows of the soul — she also said, a little reluctantly, “I don’t want to make direct reference to water and the slave trade, but I want to say it without saying it.
“But that’s not the only thing,” she added. Indeed, when I suggested the three panels could be compared to film frames, Sherald agreed. “I have film frames right there up on my vision board,” she said, looking at images from Wes Anderson, Netflix series “Stranger Things,” and Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” A phone booth that appeared in Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel” was transformed into a white watchtower in “Ecclesia.”
Born in Columbus, Georgia, Sherald was brought up in a religious family. Her father, a dentist and a trumpeter, had them join the fundamentalist Worldwide Church of God; the Sheralds were its only Black members, she recalled. They celebrated the Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday; honored Old Testament holy days, including Passover, during which they ate matzoh; and dispensed with Christmas and Easter, as well as birthdays and Halloween. All-white, too, was the Catholic school Sherald attended from kindergarten through high school.
She knew from second grade that she wanted to be an artist, and that it would involve hard work. She also would have to sort out a rather complicated identity. Her maternal great-grandfather, she explained, was a German Jew named William. “The story we have is that he was a tailor,” Sherald said, and that “my great-grandmother married a Black man, but she did have these two children with William.” When Sherald entered Clark Atlanta, a historically Black university, she left the church and did not return.
“You couldn’t marry anybody outside of the church. If I had bought into it, I probably would have married some old white guy,” she joked. (She is comfortably single at present.) Her mother and some other family members remain in the church; her father, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when Sherald was 7, died when she was 28.
Looking back, Sherald said, “Well, that was crazy. But now I wouldn’t change it. I feel it’s in the work, too. All of it is in the work. Being raised in the South is in the work.” Returning recently to Georgia to care for her aging mother, she recalled, “I got to revisit my hometown and understand how my identity was formed and how much of it was a simulation and performance.”
Along with deep feeling for her mother’s sense of decorum— “everything was very pinned and tucked,” she said — her upbringing left her with an admitted, if seldom fully indulged, appetite for sweet things. “I love the Teletubbies because that little world is so neat and the grass is green. It’s perfect,” she said, adding, “I always try to focus on the positive.”
She also acknowledged that while she doesn’t bring her troubles into the paintings, “the troubles are still there.” In fact, paradox is the humming engine of her work. Sherald has often spoken of Tim Burton’s movie “Big Fish,” a fable set in the South that turns on accepting a loved one’s embellished stories and relinquishing misguided searches for darker truths. Dancing across a spectrum that includes popular culture, its ironic critique in pop art, and fervent social statement, Sherald’s paintings feel heraldic, allied to a kind of political pageantry. Yet their message is determinedly complex.
Among the most striking aspects of Sherald’s work is her restriction to shades of gray for representing her subjects’ skin. Historically, the use of grays — known as grisaille— has been associated with paintings of stone statues, obdurate and inanimate. But Sherald infuses her grays with great warmth, bringing faces and hands to life against colorful but insistently flat settings.
The contrast is acute when she recasts well-known black-and-white photographs in full Technicolor, as in “For Love, and For Country” (2022). A standout in the retrospective, it revisits Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of a sailor kissing a woman in nurses’ whites on V-J Day at Times Square. In Sherald’s version, they are both men, embracing with delicacy and passion. It is a quietly radical contribution to “conversations around the military and sexuality” that she said had concerned her for some time.
Other challenges are raised by her 2017 painting, “What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American)” — as artist Kara Walker has done, Sherald sometimes creates titles that amount to short essays. The image centers on a young Black man wearing a slightly witchy cowboy hat, jeans and a shirt that flaunts the stars and stripes. One sleeve is black, one white. His thumbs are hooked in his pockets, and his gaze is unwavering. Who’s a cowboy now? Sherald asks. Who gets to fly the flag? Just as in “For Love,” she demands to know: Whose public kiss is celebrated?
The exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is titled “American Sublime.” A term long on Sherald’s mind, it is borrowed from a poem by Elizabeth Alexander that concerns American 19th-century landscape painting and its omission of both slavery and Native decimation. The curator, Sarah Roberts, observes in her catalog essay that Sherald favors “a distinctive kind of world-making and magical thinking.”
Roberts also brings up associations that underline the grandeur in Sherald’s work, from Caspar David Friedrich’s romanticism to Barnett Newman’s vaulting fields of color. Her paintings have been compared to 20th-century American realists such as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, along with Black figure painters such as Charles White and Barkley L. Hendricks. These comparisons help widen the lens on the bounty of figurative painting now being made by artists of color, a tendency which Sherald, in turn, has mightily influenced.
Unlike many members of her generation, she is resistant to depicting personal experience. Her sublimity is of the abstract kind: “The idea,” as she puts it, “is of portraying everydayness as excellence.”
Jordan Casteel, a figurative painter who is a good friend of Sherald, said, “Amy really wants her subjects and her spaces to feel beautiful, ethereal, elevated in some way.” When I asked if that opens her to criticism that she’s not dealing with the real world, Casteel replied, “I guess it does. Sure.” But she qualified. “It’s just, being an artist, being a Black woman, she’s opening herself up to criticism of all things.”
Casteel went on, “One of the things I admire about her most is how steadfast she is, and not swept up into the waves of other people’s expectations.”
Also cementing their friendship is the fact that both manage ongoing medical issues. “We both silently navigate a whole other job, outside of our careers, which is to keep ourselves healthy — a constant work in progress,” Casteel said. A decade after being diagnosed with genetic heart failure, Sherald had a heart transplant at 39. “I felt almost lucky,” she said. “It didn’t allow me to fuss around.”
Casteel, who has lupus, and like Sherald is immunocompromised, observes that too often, “The art world expects you to be physically present,” maskless in crowds. That is in addition, she said, to the largely unacknowledged physical demands of making big paintings, including working on scaffolding for hours. Sherald’s process requires unyielding attention to detail, and Casteel recalled her returning to photograph, in her usual thorough way, a playground slide she had seen on an out-of-town visit.
The slide appears in “Kingdom” (2022), where its gleaming metal, the heat it holds, and the rush of power and speed it promises all lend royalty to the child, who stands atop it, looking down with perfect inscrutability. The metal is spotless, as are the child’s clothes, and the sky is cloudless. While Sherald demurred on this point, it’s hard not to see a link between her awareness of health hazards and the sparklingly clear atmospheres — the zones of safety — Sherald so often conjures.
On occasion, though, she has jumped into the fray. Her blazing images of Obama and Taylor feature the only named subjects in Sherald’s body of work, and they belong, she said, as much to history as to art. (The Taylor portrait is owned jointly by an art museum and a history museum.) She declined to comment on sharing the honor of portraying the former first lady with Kehinde Wiley, who was commissioned to paint President Barack Obama; Wiley has since faced accusations of sexual assault, which he has denied.
Sherald admitted to being slightly wary of what Roberts, the curator, called the “responsibility that she carries as someone with a significant voice who really can impact the national conversation.”
But it will find her even if she doesn’t seek it.
When I asked Sherald if she’d take a role in the Harris campaign, she said she hadn’t been invited. But moments later she texted a link to an article in the Guardian featuring her image of two men embracing in “For Love, and for Country.” The author said she’d thought about Sherald’s painting “when seeing all the images of Kamala Harris taking to the stand,” and cheered the possibility that “for future generations this extraordinary sight will become normal.”
In two arresting works still in progress when I saw them, Sherald is speaking not only for people of color, but for others who have been marginalized. “It’s ridiculous not to look at everyone as a human being with needs — with emotional needs, with medical needs,” she said. A professional wrestler and MMA athlete who is legless appears in one of the new paintings, his head, chest, arms and massive gloved hands forming an unshakable pyramid. The other new work features a transgender woman flaunting one long, bared leg and staring dauntlessly at the viewer. Its paired sources are John Singer Sargent’s portrait of “Madame X,” and the Statue of Liberty. Sherald gave her a small bunch of flowers in lieu of a torch. They burn brightly.
At the end of the studio visit, Sherald said she related strongly to Cord Jefferson’s 2023 movie “American Fiction,” the wry drama of a middle-class Black novelist urged to ground his writing in adversity and violence.
Like the film’s protagonist, she told me, “I don’t want my work to specifically be recognized as a corrective narrative.” She added, “You don’t have to live the fight to be the fight. And I don’t always want my identity to be associated with resistance and struggle.”
Least of all does she embrace bitter endings. Shameless optimism is her second act.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
