Amy SHERALD — first black woman to paint an official First Lady portrait

Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and are not my scientific studies or discoveries. Bear with me as I am editing all the texts and crediting the authors. Thank you!

Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In our eighth episode, we will talk about Amy SHERALD — the first black woman to paint an official portrait of the First Lady. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about the artist that explores the ways people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations.

Curious Fact #1

Sherald was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, the third of four children. Her father was a dentist, but when Sherald was seven, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which ended his practice. To make ends meet, her all-conquering mother, who had been a housewife, became a bank manager, and Sherald took over a lot of the housework and looked after her younger brother, Michael. The family went to church every Saturday, a strict fundamentalist sect called the Worldwide Church of God, which forbids celebrating Christmas, Easter, or birthdays, and bans TV from Friday night to Saturday night.

Curious Fact #2

Amy earned her bachelor’s degree in 1997 at Clark-Atlanta University. Concurrent with her studies, Sherald apprenticed with artist-historian Dr. Arturo Lindsay of Spelman College. Arturo Lindsay is a Panamanian born artist with a scholarship that specializes in ethnographic research on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions in contemporary American cultures. Sherald soon relocated to Baltimore and went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she studied with Grace Hartigan one of the most celebrated young American women painters that developed abstract expressionism movement. Before Sherald moved to Baltimore, her art had a strongly autobiographical focus. Afterward, she shifted her attention to content that offered a critical view of African American cultural history and the representation of the African American body.

Curious Fact #3

Sherald is drawn to the way in which African-American family photographs served as intimate, personal portraits, during a time when only white individuals or groups were being iconized in paintings. While her subjects are always African-American, Sherald renders their skin-tone exclusively in grisaille — an absence of color that directly challenges perceptions of black identity and seeks, in the artist’s words, ‘to exclude the idea of color as race.’ Sherald offsets this against a vibrant palette: eye-popping clothes and ephemera float in tension against abstracted backgrounds. The depth created by the pastel backgrounds are not confined to any specific time or space but seem to exist beyond the facts of recorded history and national borders.

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Curious Fact #4

One of the crucial moments in Amy’s career happened in 2007 when she came to New York to see Kara Walker’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum. “It was riveting and amazing and disturbing in all the right ways,” she tells in an interview for Vogue Magazine, “but afterward I was trying to process it within my own experience, the experience of a black girl growing up in the South. And I realized in that moment there was no conversation happening around just black people being black. It was everything but that. Culturally we’re presented in one way. It’s like, Africa, slave boat, slave, civil rights, President Obama. And that’s supposed to be the happy ending. But there are so many different tropes of who we are, and how we exist, and all that needs to be expressed, as well.” At the end of the interview, Amy added “Nothing about black history or black American culture is frivolous. Everything is so serious; we all still carry the shackle of history. But when I was in the hospital, feeling the imminence of death… I wanted to know who I really was, without all the gender and racial restrictions.”

Curious Fact #5

In 2012 when Amy Sherald was 39, she collapsed in a Baltimore Rite Aid. The artist had been diagnosed eight years earlier with a disease of the heart muscle that makes it difficult for the organ to pump blood — and had been told that she would need a heart transplant. At the time, it hadn’t seemed urgent. She was in great physical shape, even training to compete in a triathlon. All of a sudden, she was in the hospital at Johns Hopkins, waiting for the transplant. By a cruel irony, her beloved younger brother, Michael, was dying from non–smoking-related lung cancer in Georgia. Amy recalls “I knew at that point I had to live because my mom couldn’t lose two children within weeks.” Eleven days after Michael died, Sherald got a new heart and a new life.

Curious Fact #6

In March 2016 she found out that she won the National Portrait Gallery Competition. Amy remembers giggling to herself because she was complaining about having to spend $50 on the application fee. She had to borrow money to get a dress from Rent the Runway and to get to D.C. It was one of those moments where you’re at the precipice and you’re about to fall over, and then all of a sudden something happens. Thanks to this win her name had surfaced in front of the Obamas. She is the first woman and the first African American to win it.

Curious Fact #7

This is how Amy Sherald described working with Michelle in an article for TIME magazine: ”Working with Michelle Obama was really fun. There are people who don’t normally go to museums that are interested in art now. They are seeing themselves in different ways. That’s the most important part and focus for myself. Parker Curry, the little girl who went viral looking at the painting, thinks Michelle is a queen and that the National Portrait Gallery is her castle. She has a real, live person to look up to, versus a cartoon character. There’s a difference between fantasy and reality. Michelle Obama is reality. This painting is a first and she is a first. So it makes sense that that image doesn’t look like the other images, that it is as different as she is in the arc of history.”

Thank you so much for listening to the sixth episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. Tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Tarsila DO AMARAL — one of the leading Latin American modernist artists. See you later!