This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing!
You can also support it by buying Art & books. Details at the end. Thank you!
Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.
Preface-
In honor of those who saved my life 19 years ago on February 7th, 2007, as one way of giving Thanks, this piece honors another survivor (of a different ailment): the Painter Amy Sherald. Amy’s remarkable story is told here better than I could tell it. My look at her Art follows.
Shows seen:
Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter…, Hauser & Wirth, October, 2019, and
Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Whitney Museum, Summer, 2025
The Whitney & MoMA went toe-to-toe with dueling summer blockbusters in 2025, with each institution mounting two. I began this series with a look at Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA, where Jack Whitten: The Messenger was installed on 6. All the while, 40 blocks south, Amy Sherald: American Sublime was up at the same time as Christine Sun Kim’s landmark All Day All Night, comprising the Whitney share of the four must-see Summer shows.
Hauser & Wirth, October 15, 2019.
I first saw Amy Sherald’s work at her NYC debut show, “the heart of the matter…,” at Hauser & Wirth in October, 2019, a show that contained 8 Paintings.
The select content allowed for more space around each that worked extremely well in my view. Handsome, 2019, Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 inches, was also shown in American Sublime. Seen at Hauser & Wirth, October 15, 2019.
Fast forward to April 9, 2025, American Sublime contains 44 Paintings, the earliest dating from 2007- just 18 years prior! In those last two sentences hides the remarkable fact that Ms. Sherald (B. 1973) went from NYC debut show to an NYC early mid-career major museum Retrospective in a little more than five years! There aren’t a lot of Artists I can say that about.
Whitney Museum, July 25, 2025
Installation view. July 25, 2025.
What’s more remarkable is that just seven years before her Hauser show, on December 18, 2012, Amy Sherald underwent a heart transplant at age 39! That concluded a harrowing 10 years she spent after being diagnosed with congestive heart failure at age 30, and a two-month wait in the hospital for a donated heart (as is recounted in the piece I linked up top). Today, Amy Sherald is yet another fine Painter who burst on the scene this past decade and has wasted no time solidifying a place in museums around the world.
Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014. Oil on canvas. The Painting that brought Amy Sherald to national attention was inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
And, “burst on the scene…” she did as her 2019 NYC debut show came just three years after Amy won the 2016 National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), becoming both the first woman and the first African-American woman to win it.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama aka First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018, Oil on linen. (The first title was on the wall card.) After being personally selected by Mrs. Obama to Paint her official Portrait, a prescient choice at the time. Amy Sherald’s stature has only continued to grow. The former First Lady selected the Michelle Smith Milly label dress she is wearing that channels Piet Mondrian through Gee’s Bends Quilt Making, blending the modern with the historic. Gee’s Bend is a remote Black Alabama community of the descendants of former slaves.
Most well-known today, perhaps, for her Portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, Amy Sherald: American Sublime revealed the depth of her accomplishment (already) in works that are almost always forthright, with subjects usually facing the viewer head-on, while steeped in a subtlety that rewards extended and repeated looking. Adding a unique twist is that the faces, hands, arms, legs of each of her subjects are gorgeously rendered in grisaille(!), something I’ve never seen done in a color Painting before, and something that has become her trademark. She uses grisaille as a way of “challenging the concept of color as race1.”
Untitled (Opal), 2019, Oil on linen. Standing in front of Opal, I found myself wondering why I’d never seen a Painting like this before. It seems so incredibly straight-forward, yet only Amy Sherald could have Painted it and made it as unique as it is. From the grisaille, to the position of her hands & fingers, to her expression and the choice of colors, which Wes Anderson might admire, it’s a remarkable blend of a Portrait of Opal through the eyes of an Artist with a vision.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I spent much time wondering what new developments would come to Portraiture after the work of great 20th Century Artists, like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Picasso, and others. 25+ years in, the genre is continually being reinvented, yet again, by a number of Artists who have come to prominence this decade- including Amy Sherald, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Frank Auerbach (who passed away in 2024).
Bo Bartlett, Oligarchy, 2016, Oil on linen. See at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, August 12, 2016.
Interestingly, Amy credits the Painter Bo Bartlett with showing her the possibilities. Others have posited that Ms. Sherald’s use of grisaille goes back to old black & white Photos of Black subjects, and not Painting or Painted Portraiture. However, on 19th Century Photographs Ms. Sherald said-
“It wasn’t what inspired my work, but it’s what affirmed my journey with it, and it’s where I was finally able to find these representations of black Americans that spoke to me in the same way that I wanted my work to speak to the world. They were family photographs, similar to the image of my grandmother that I oftentimes mention, where she had her picture taken.”
The Artist’s grandmother, Jewel Hendricks, as seen on page 28 of the excellent American Sublime catalog.
“Looking at how they represented themselves— they’re quiet, regal, graceful. It was an outward action that had inward meaning. They don’t smile, but there’s something there-this is what I look for in people— the feeling that you get when you look at those old photographs. When you look into their eyes, you are being told a story. It’s almost as if they’re standing in front of you, and they have a living and breathing kind of energy. There is something so captivating about that. And it’s not frivolous. It’s a very serious, deliberate kind of thing, having your picture taken, especially then2.”
Breonna Taylor, 2020 Oil on linen.
In work after work, American Sublime reveals that Amy Sherald is a master of Portrait story telling. Her Portrait of Michelle Obama, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, is a classic case in point that manages to subtly weave multiple threads. Crossing cultural boundaries by dialoguing Mondrian-like elements and Gee’s Bends Quilt Making is artistically ground-breaking, topped off with a natural and wonderfully relaxed pose, enhanced by the background pale blue, that is just stunning. This is just what Amy Sherald does. Commissioned to Paint the late Breonna Taylor, her first posthumous Portrait, Ms. Sherald visited her family and spent time with her mother, Tamika Palmer, who spoke of Breonna’s interest in fashion. Amy commissioned a dress for the Portrait, and also added an engagement ring on her finger “to represent the love between Taylor and her partner, Kenneth Walker… Sherald incorporated the ring to give him solace and to suggest a brighter future3.” Of the finished Painting she said, “I don’t think I thought much about the viewer so much as I thought about her family when I was making this portrait….but when you’re speaking about violence against women and police brutality, she’s become the face for that movement,” she said4.
The intro for the Audio Guide for her 2019 Painting, The Girl Next Door says, “The artist discusses how she transforms the historical function of portraiture.” That’s a lot to have accomplished in 18 years already. Along the way, she renders a wide range of subjects that encompass an equally wide range of Black Americans, including more than a few who are new to museum walls showing the scope of her vision.
American Grit, 2024 Oil on linen.
As soon as she was able to, she sought out the family of the woman, Kristen, whose heart she now has. Amy was 39 when she received Kristin’s heart. Kristin died at 38. Amy calls it “a perfect match.”
Kingdom, 2022 Oil on linen
“What kind of person was she? What kind of things did she like. Who did she love? I romantically believe in muscle memory, heart memory. It means a lot for me to be able to just kind of get to know her family a little bit. When I met her father he made me feel her heart beat. … I still call it Kristen’s heart.”
Trans Forming Liberty, 2024 Oil on canvas
“I live without fear. I work without fear. I wake up and produce these ideas without thinking so much about painting something stupid or people not liking it. I’m living this moment: I wake up every day, and I have to make sure that my work continues to speak to generations. I need to make things that are going to resonate in that way.”
For Love, and for Country, 2022 Oil on linen.
She continues, “But I also truly believe in who I am as a human. I believe in my power. I believe in timing. I believe that this is my “now,” and that nothing can go wrong now. I understand that as a fact. I’ve been through the worst of the worst, and it was still okay. I wake up, and I keep it moving every day for Kristin and my brother Michael. You don’t waste second chances5.”
A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt), 2022 Oil on linen.
*- Soundtrack for this piece is “I Can See Clearly Now,” written & performed by Johnny Nash from the 1972 album of the same name, which he performs the following year-
For those who kept me here, and for Lisa, who gave this total stranger her extra ticket to the sold-out Basquiat show at the Brant Foundation in Spring, 2019, enabling me to see it and share it with the world. As she was leaving she told me she was looking forward to seeing Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter….
NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for 10 1/2 years, during which over 340 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate securely by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.
You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.
Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.