A painter of luminous figurative compositions, Amy Sherald thinks like a filmmaker.
When I visited her Jersey City studio this summer, she put it plainly: “I’m directing in the paintings.” Sherald became famous after her portrait of the 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, Ky., 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.
The work begins, she explained, with finding sitters — actors, really — to support characters and stories of her own devising.
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 risqué) images of herself accompanying this article.
“Let me reintroduce myself,” Sherald wants the photos to say.
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Filmmaker by trade, Amy Sherald is a painter of brilliant figurative compositions. “I’m directing in the paintings,” she said bluntly when I visited her studio in Jersey City this summer. “.
Sherald rose to fame in 2018 when her painting of Michelle Obama, the former first lady, was revealed. Sherald’s painting of Breonna Taylor, a Black nurse who was shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky in 2020, attracted more attention. when her house was raided. It is still among the most well-known images of protest and tenacity to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement.
However, Sherald’s claim to fame as a portrait painter is unfounded. As a matter of fact, she virtually never uses real subjects. Finding sitters, or actors, to support her own invented characters and stories, she explained, is the first step in the process. All Black, her subjects are friends, strangers, and more recently, people she met through casting agents. She dresses, poses, and takes hundreds of pictures of them. They typically direct their gaze directly at the observer and create a commanding silence in the resulting paintings.
When I visited Sherald, she was wearing loose gray pants and a black top; for the colorful (and slightly risque) pictures of herself that go with this piece, she borrowed fashionable attire. Sherald recently turned 51, and at this point in her life, she’s happy to “rid myself of the critical self I grew up with” and rediscover her inner child. Sherald wants the pictures to convey the message, “Let me reintroduce myself.”. “I’m happy like this. “.
Her uncommon optimism flies against the current cultural winds. Her recent work clearly demonstrates this. Deeper overtones are also included. Opening in November, Sherald’s most extensive survey to date will feature both fully on display. 16 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before making its way the following year to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her expansive new painting “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” which she has been working on all summer, will greet guests. It’s a triptych, her first, with one figure in each panel, framed by a kind of watchtower against the blue sky. The Greek word for “assembly” in the title also denotes the word “church,” a connection that is further highlighted by the panels’ rounded tops, which are reminiscent of ecclesiastical architecture.
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