British Vogue: Amy Sherald
All hail artist Amy Sherald's first London exhibition says Kin Woo
When the American painter Amy Sherald first saw Tim Burton’s 2003 fantasy drama Big Fish as a young artist working in Baltimore, it triggered something inside her: “Black people haven’t really been afforded that kind of representation,” she says from her studio in Jersey City . “I remember feeling a sense of jealousy because I wanted those kinds of narratives.”
Ever since then, the 48-year-old Georgia native has built a career depicting the experiences and inner lives of Black people, all rendered in her signature grisaille in place of black skin tones – a deliberate choice to take race out of the equation, which, as she explains, “started off as an aesthetic decision, but it ends up being connected to this idea of just wanting to be seen”.
Her most famous painting – the official portrait of a regal-looking Michelle Obama for the US National Portrait Gallery in 2018 – was followed two years later with another acclaimed commission: an extraordinarily graceful and poignant portrait of Breonna Taylor – the 26-year-old EMT who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville – for the cover of Vanity Fair in 2020. “The longevity of this portrait is something that the Black Lives Matter movement needed, to codify what happened that year and to continue to inspire people to keep fighting the fight,” she says. Wanting to “solidify Breonna’s legacy in a real way”, Sherald recently donated $1 million to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates.
Now, Sherald is coming to Europe for the first time with a suite of new paintings she will unveil at Hauser & Wirth London this autumn. Titled The World We Make, in it she continues her mission of reinserting Black figures into the art historical canon in a radical act of representation. Take the monumental “For Love, and For Country”, a queer, revisionist take on Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic 1945 image “V-J Day in Times Square”, in which she swaps out the white sailor kissing a nurse for two Black men in uniform. “I wanted to consider masculinity and love,” she says. “It was a way to nod to the history of prejudice. There’s an urgency to speak out about racism and homophobia, so I wanted to put that to the forefront of people’s minds.” Elsewhere, a diptych of dirt bikers caught in mid-air represents “something that I found truly inspiring and liberating. This is about freedom in a place that feels oppressive.”
In making work about Black people existing as themselves, Sherald sees her paintings as “a place to reflect. I want it to be as open, expansive and universal in a sense. I want my work to be a gift to Black people.”
