AMERICAN painter Amy Sherald went from being diagnosed with congestive heart failure at the age of 30, serving a lengthy s tint waiting tables until the age of 38 so as to finance her desire to become a painter, and being a recipient of a heart transplant at the age of 39 in December 2012 – to becoming, in 2016, the first woman as well as the first African American ever to win a National Portrait Gallery’s premier competition, becoming, in 2017, the first African American ever to receive a presidential portrait commission from the National Portrait Gallery, and realizing, in 2020, an artwork of hers selling for almost thirty times its presale estimate at auction, for $4 265 000.
Yet her parents (her father was a dentist) had preferred she pursued a career in medicine with her mother vehemently dissuading her proclivity for art – a conflict which only served to bring her determination to the fore, and regarding whose opposition she is quoted as uttering that “what I needed was somebody to prove wrong.”
Her initial encounter with art had been through illustrations of the ilk of Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt which she beheld in her family’s Encyclopaedia Britannica set, and her impression would become enhanced when she became exposed to a painting featuring a Black figure whilst on a school and field trip to her local ColumbusCMuseum of Art – a discovery she would go on to describe as a shock which brought her comprehension of the moment together, “that somebody created this who was alive at the same time that I was alive.”
Attending school as one of few African American students in a predominantly White area in America’s South, Sherald’s light-coloured skin further compounded her situation – an experience which made her conscious of race from an early age! Her own path to fulfilling her desire of becoming an artist came via Clark Atlanta University where she commenced on a pre-medicine track her parents had hoped for, simultaneously cross-registering for a painting class at Spelman College where as a sophomore, she studied under art historian, Arturo Lindsay.
After graduating with a B.A. degree in painting from Clark in 1997, Sherald would take an apprentice with Lindsay – painting for free for five years! Having also accomplished a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2004, she went on to do an internship with Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway, where she learned his old master-based techniques for painting light and shadow.
Before the transplant (for which Sherald expresses her gratitude to her donor for their paths having crossed – a mention which appears in the tome’s acknowledgements segment), she lost her father to Parkinson’s disease and her kid brother to lung cancer, and had to put her artistic career on pause so that she could take care of an ailing family member. ‘Twas only when a benefactor offered her shelter that she was able to quit the waitressing job and focus on painting.
Sherald paints from photographs of people she randomly encounters in her everyday life, who she then invites for photography sessions. For every person (model) she paints, she chooses clothing and a setting, then photographs her subjects while carefully coaching them to find a pose and facial expression that conveys the narrative she imagines. She depicts the skin tones of her Black models in grayscale rather than flesh tones, utilizing the gray hues to challenge an idea of race where skin colour automatically assigns a category.
Her preference of such a process had been reinforced by 19th-and-20th-century black-&-white photographic portraits, particularly those of Black people presented by W.E.B. DuBois at the 1900 Paris Exposition – which, upon beholding, she purposed to henceforth redefine!
Her stock rose further when then U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama chose Sherald to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in 2017. In delivering on the exclusive commission, Sherald avoided creating a painting similar to Obama’s ‘public entity’, instead opting for one ‘private and intimate’. The creative process entailed her setting up photography sessions in D.C. (District of Columbia) and going through a plethora of dresses with Obama’s stylist – eventually settling on a casual, sleeveless maxi dress from a designer’s Spring 2017 collection for an American fashion line.
She applied her signature grayscale to depict Obama’s skin, seeking the viewer to behold her in her entirety as a person rather than solely as her racial identity. Unveiled in 2018, the portrait, along with that of her husband, then President Barack Obama – drew multitudes of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery! Elaborating on how she came to choose Sherald, Michelle Obama recounted an immediate connection upon meeting the artist, feeling “blown away by the boldness of her colours and the uniqueness of her subject matter” as well as Sherald’s personal presence: “Within the first few minutes of our conversation, I knew she was the one for me.”
Another of Sherald’s noteworthy artworks is that of Breonna Taylor – the 26-year-old African American medical worker who was killed by Louisville police in her apartment in March 2020. A 2020 oil on linen painting, it depicts Taylor wearing a free-flowing blue dress against an aqua background. It went on to be featured on the September cover of Vanity Fair magazine of that year.
Describing the portrait to the publication, Sherald is quoted thus: “Taylor sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong! I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.” The painting was jointly acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 2022, Sherald gave $1 million from its sale to the University of Louisville to establish two grant programs in Taylor’s name.
Also among the phantasmagoria of plates are: For Love, and for Country, a 2022 oil on linen painting limning a variation of Life magazine photographer, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 tableau of a sailor kissing a nurse on Time Square on VJ Day, and The Bathers, a 2015 largescale oil on canvas painting depicting two women in polka dot and yellow swimsuits which sold for $4 265 000 at auction in December 2020.
The Head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarah Robert (the person responsible for compiling the publication) surveyed in an essay preceding the cornucopia of the paintings appearing in the tome, that Sherald’s work explores the way one’s interior life and self-perception might shift while moving through the world – a theme she points out at being reflected on two specific painting titles Sherald drew from African American novelists, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and regarding which she further stated as connecting to Harlem Renaissance exponent, W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of two-ness or double consciousness he outlined in 1897 to describe his experience of navigating the world as a Black person and feeling split between trying to remain true to himself and Black culture whilst simultaneously conforming to the expectations of a White-dominated society.
Roberts furthermore observed that Sherald’s drive to portray Black life as an open field of possibility grew out of reflection on how her perspective on her own identity had shifted as she moved through communities with different racial makeups and relationships to the diaspora. She continued on to mention that Sherald has frequently noted that she sees her work in the lineage of American Realism, quoting the artist as having observed: “I look at America’s heart – people, landscapes and cityscapes – and I see it as an opportunity to add to an American art narrative that was written by painters who were mostly White and male.”
Sherald had conceptualized the title of this tome for some ten years before its realization. The idea of the sublime is a sinuous concept referring to an experiential state which emerged as a Romantic notion describing instances of emotional magnitude in response to the natural world.
A hardback, Amy Sherald: American Sublime is published by Yale University Press and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R1 080.
