How Amy Sherald’s paintings encapsulate the extraordinary banality of Black existence.
About 2008, Amy Sherald started experimenting with her signature style, which involves painting Black people in gray monochrome. She was painting people true to their complexion in her Baltimore studio at the time when another artist suggested she paint figures in grayscale to expedite the creative process.
It developed into an artistic choice that ultimately made sense. Since 2012’s “Equilibrium,” Sherald has painted predominantly Black people, often against colorful backgrounds or dressed in vibrant outfits. However, the people themselves are gray, including her most well-known portrait subject, former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Sherald, 48, realized over time that her decision to interpret the rich complexity of Black skin in gray tones may be a reaction to Black art’s marginalization — “the dialogue and debate surrounding and being exclusively about identity,” she explained. “I wished for it to exist in a more universal way in a world.”
“I’m not trying to take race out of the work,” Sherald said. “I was simply attempting to find a way to minimize its prominence.”
Sherald, who now resides in the New York metropolitan area, recently debuted paintings in her first West Coast solo exhibition, which is on display at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles until June 6. “The Great American Fact” is a series of five paintings produced in 2020 that concentrate on Black daily life. One painting, about 11 feet by 9 feet, shows two Black surfers in wetsuits at the beach.
Sherald’s portraits often show people she meets in public. Sherald notices a spark, something “that is possibly only seen and felt by me, people who have a certain weight to their energy and spirit.” “There’s usually something slightly uncomfortable and quirky about them that piques my interest in pursuing them and turning them into a painting.”
Sherald started two works prior to the outbreak. She found the model in her 54 inch-by-43 inch painting “Hope is the thing with feathers (The little bird)” onstage at an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater production.
As national closures and quarantines forced citizens to stay indoors last year, Sherald took to Instagram, scouring hashtags and using six degrees of separation to discover new inspiration. She discovered the woman in her painting “A Midsummer Afternoon Dream” via social media, who appears at ease posing against a yellow bicycle in a billowy blue gown.
“My work does not condemn African-American life to grief,” Sherald said. “There is an assumption that the entirety of a Black life is inextricably linked to struggle. I believe it becomes all-consuming and has the potential to codify our existence and entire experience.”
Instead of painting what she describes as the exclamation points and periods — “when there’s loss of life, it’s a period at the end of a sentence,” she explained — Sherald sees her work representing the “dash” of life, the in-between moments of everyday living. “I feel as if I’m restoring us to our natural state, which is that of a fully functioning person.”
Sherald was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in painting from Clark Atlanta University and a master’s degree in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art. Sherald was commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to produce the official portrait of the former first lady, which was unveiled in 2018.
Her second commission came last summer from journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who asked her to produce a portrait of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman killed by police inside her Louisville apartment, for the Vanity Fair cover. Sherald spoke with Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, to gain a better understanding of her daughter’s personality, ultimately producing a painting that depicted Taylor as graceful and regal.
Sherald’s painting of Taylor will be jointly held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and by the Speed Museum in Louisville. “I wanted to find an organization that would be a good steward of this work and would be able to position her life in this painting in a way that would allow it to continue telling a story,” Sherald explained.
Museum spaces are significant, for some an introduction to the Black experience. “A lot of people have no idea who we are or how we live,” Sherald explained. “We, like everyone else, live very dull lives.”
She referred to the group of Black middle school students who said they experienced racism from staff and patrons at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2019.
“They were stared at and made to feel unwelcome,” Sherald said. “I consider the possibility of my art being seen in spaces like that, and the impact that would have had — not only on the white audiences in the museum, but also on the sense of ownership that those Black children would have had.”
Recently, she was tagged in an Instagram post that moved her to tears.
Someone snapped an image of her painting “As American as apple pie,” zooming in on the detail in the man’s hair, writing: “I’ve never in my entire artgoing life, from childhood to now, seen the brush waves of my youth immortalised on canvas with such care, complexity, passion, + special understanding.”
Sherald sighs with nostalgia as she remembers her father wearing his hair in this manner, with smooth waves produced with pomade and careful brushing.
“The beauty of that one easy, daily, mundane, banal behavior is ingrained in our culture,” Sherald explained. “And an integral part of our cultural heritage.”
