AMY SHERALD

Early Years

Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1973. Her parents Amos and Geraldine wanted her to be a doctor and sent her to private school, where Sherald was one of only a handful of Black students. Sherald recalls visiting the city museum in Columbus as a teenager and seeing Bo Bartlett’s 1986 oil painting Object Permanence, which was the first time she’d noticed a Black figure in a painting. “It turned on the light,” she said. “I thought: ‘I wanna do that too.” She gained her BFA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University in 1997 (switching major from pre-med), also participating in Spelman College’s international artist-in-residence programme in Panama. She gained her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. For a decade, she painted every day while working as a waitress every night. Her work rose to prominence when she won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016 (the first Black person to win the prize).

Amy Sherald: Artworks

Amy Sherald is an American Realist, comparable to Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell. Her large-scale portraits are distinctively non-traditional: often there’s no environmental context to the figures she paints. Her subjects’ skin is rendered in greyscale, a direct contrast to often-bright clothes and backgrounds characterised by rich blocks of colour. Her subjects stare out of the canvas at their viewers—“I don’t think these portraits are confrontational,” Sherald has said, “but they are present and they do want you to sit with them and have an exchange.” Her creative process begins with photography—she asks friends, models and strangers to pose for her and keeps rails of thrift-store clothes in her studio for her subjects to wear.

• Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014) won Sherald the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016. A young Black woman in a navy-and-white dress and a bright red hat holds a huge teacup and saucer in her white-gloved hands, exuding a quiet power and sense of self-confidence.
• In 2017’s What’s Different About Alice Is That She Has the Most Incisive Way of Telling the Truth, a woman points a camera directly at the viewer, while also meeting them with her gaze. Against a flat sage-green background, the feather patterns on the subject’s skirt pop out.
• A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt) (2022) depicts a man in dungarees posing on an immaculate John Deere tractor. The grass beneath him is rendered in an unexpected level of detail (compared with Sherald’s block-colour backgrounds), while a hint of cloud hovers in the blue sky behind his head.

Amy Sherald: Select Awards

• Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2016)
• Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2017)
• Smithsonian Ingenuity Award (2019)
• Time magazine Woman of the Year honouree (2026)

Amy Sherald: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Amy Sherald: American Sublime, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024) (and touring)
• Amy Sherald, Hauser & Wirth, Monaco (2023)
• Amy Sherald. The World We Make, Hauser & Wirth, London (2022)
• Amy Sherald. The Great American Fact, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2021)
• Amy Sherald the heart of the matter..., Hauser & Wirth, New York City (2019)
• Amy Sherald, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (2018) (and touring)
• Amy Sherald, Monique Meloche LES, New York City (2017)
• A Wonderful Dream, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2016)
• Off the Chain: American Art Unfettered, Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville (2015)
• Amy Sherald: Paintings, Reginald F Lewis Museum, Baltimore (2013)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Sunday Best: The Power and The Glory of Black Style, Art Gallery of Ontario (2026)
• A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York City (2025)
• The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2024) (and touring)
• Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation, National Portrait Gallery, London (2023)
• The Story of Art as it’s Still Being Written, Victoria Miro, London (2022)
• Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC (2020)
• The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC (2016)
• Revealing the Presence of Africans in the European Renaissance, Galerie Myrtis, Baltimore (2012)
• Quasi-Painting, Randall Scott Gallery, Washington DC (2008)
• Femme Effect, Sub-basement Gallery, Baltimore (2005)
• Lipstick, City Hall of Atlanta Gallery (2002)

Further Reading

• Amy Sherald’s Instagram
• Interview on 60 Minutes (2025)
• Artist profile page at Hauser & Wirth
• Artist profile page at the National Museum of Women in the Arts
• 2023 interview in Colossal

Amy Sherald FAQs

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