Famously known today for her award-winning piece Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., painter Amy Sherald is a well-renowned artist who uses meaningful and artistic techniques in her portraits to represent different “African-American experiences”.
Her work first became prominent in 2016 (although she had a long and successful career as an artist before that, as she points out), when she became the first woman and the first African American person to receive 1st place in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in Washington D.C. for her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). In the piece, she utilized her staple grayscale technique that can be seen in many of her other paintings, called grisaille—to represent a young girl with black facial features and gray skin tone, holding an Alice in Wonderland-inspired teacup. Actually inspired by the fairy-tale-like nature of the story, Sherald shows an alternative existence to the stereotypical Black narrative that has been shaped by white people throughout history.
All of Sherald’s work depicts African American subjects, as her work is inspired by the art and intimacy of African-Amerian family portraits in a world where only white existence mattered— she was especially inspired by photographs collected by W.E.B. Du Bois (displayed at the Paris Exposition in 1900), depicting African-American men, women, and children in alternative perspectives from the stereotypical black narrative.
Through her use of grayscale in the depiction of black skin-tones, she is also able to sort of erase and eliminate the color in her subjects’ skin tones in order to highlight the racial identity and humanity of her subjects—provoking thoughtful personal reflections on the concept of race. Sherald, who was born in 1973 Georgia, says her incorporation of grisaille stems from her early childhood as she remembers learning about and bonding with her grandmother after looking through family albums of their black-and-white photography. She was also inspired by the direct gaze of her grandmother in one specific photograph— a characteristic she also included in both Miss Everything and Former First Lady (along with an ambiguous background setting).
Her presidential portrait of Former First Lady Michelle Obama The piece and an accompanying piece of Former President Barack Obama made Sherald and artist Kehinde Wiley two of the first African-Americans to ever receive presidential portrait commissions.
Today, Sherald continues to do groundbreaking work for African American art through her portraits. In fact, she created Breonna Taylor’s portrait for the cover of the September Vanity Fair in 2020. She is also committed to imminent social causes and important community work as she teaches art in prisons and art projects with teenagers.