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. In fact, she almost always invents her subjects. The work begins, she explained, with finding sitters — actors, really — to support characters and stories of her own devising. Her subjects, all Black, are friends, strangers and, lately, people found through casting agents, whom she clothes and poses (often amid props), then submits to hundreds of photographs. 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. At this point in her life — Sherald just turned 51 — she’s delighted to “rid myself of the critical self I grew up with,” and to reconnect with her inner child. “Let me reintroduce myself,” Sherald wants the photos to say. “This is me being happy.”
Her optimism is rare and sails against the winds of contemporary culture. It is evident in her current work. So, too, are deeper overtones. Both will be fully on view in Sherald’s most comprehensive survey to date, opening Nov. 16 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York next year. Greeting visitors will be her sweeping new painting “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” which she has been working on all summer. A triptych, her first, it features a single figure per panel, each framed by a kind of watchtower set against an azure sky. The first word of the title in Greek means “assembly”; more commonly, it’s the root for church, a connection emphasized by the panels’ rounded tops, which evoke ecclesiastic architecture.