Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly figurative paintings. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black life centrally in American art. In October 2022, Sherald presented a suite of new paintings in “The World We Make,” her first European solo exhibition at Hauser and Wirth in London and traveling to Monaco in 2023.
Sherald received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and BA in painting from Clark Atlanta University. Sherald was the first woman and first African American to receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; she is also recipient of the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. In 2018, Sherald was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait commission for the National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC.
