I Was Born Free

Sherald’s own story as an artist began when her sixth-grade art teacher in Columbus, Georgia, took the class to the Columbus Museum to see the work of contemporary artist Bo Bartlett. On that visit, Sherald came across Bartlett’s painting Object Permanence (1986)—a domestic scene of a family arrayed in and around a simple redbrick house—and in it, she was surprised by something she had never seen before in a work of art: a Black person.

The main subject, a confident and warm Black man staring out at the viewer with his hands on his hips, brought to her attention two critical things: how rarely, if ever, such depictions existed in art history and museums; and that she wanted to make paintings like this—large-scale depictions of people that revealed stories.

With this latter realization, Sherald began working to position herself within the tradition of American realism and of the history of Western art, generally. Every European art history course includes the hierarchy of genres by which painting was judged from the Renaissance through the 19th century: history painting at the top, portraiture a close second. Sherald’s paintings do a bit of both in a thoroughly contemporary vein, not least because of her decision to exclusively depict Black people.

Considering her mission as an artist and her placement within a particular lineage, Sherald has said: “I consider myself an American realist. For me, it means … recognizing my American-ness first and … wanting the work to join a greater ongoing conversation. Edward Hopper or Andy Wyeth—they’re telling these American stories, and I’m also telling American stories.”

The question of which, and whose, American stories are being told is at the heart of the matter. American realist painters of the 20th century like Robert Henri, Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois, all of whom were included in the founding collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, were committed to showcasing what was “real,” but of course they could convincingly portray only the reality that they knew. As a result, they had rare, if any, occasion to portray African Americans. Hopper’s South Carolina Morning (1955), for example, is the only painting in his career of more than four decades to depict an African American woman.

The painting is based on a chance encounter that Hopper and his wife, Josephine, had in Charleston some thirty years before with a woman standing outside her home. Whether the woman they saw and the woman of the painting share an affinity is difficult to know but, as with Sherald’s paintings, the subject tells a story with her tightly crossed arms, her matching red dress and hat and her stern facial expression.

In the almost surreal background—an endless sea of grass swaying under a perfect blue sky—there is something reminiscent of Sherald’s Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between (2018) and Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019). Despite these similarities, the artist is himself a character in South Carolina Morning’s story: There is a sense that what we are seeing as viewers is the woman seeing Hopper seeing her, rather than actually seeing her.

Of course, a work recalling an encounter with a stranger is very different from one based on a studio photograph of a styled, street-cast subject, as Sherald’s portraits are. It’s also different from a painting completed over multiple sittings with a well-known figure who has a particular public image to project. This is likely how Henri created his commissioned portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the eponymous founder of the museum.

An artist, patron, socialite and heir to the fortunes of two of the wealthiest American families of the 19th and 20th centuries, Whitney is presumably portrayed by Henri as she wished to be: nonchalant, self-possessed, modern, direct. The same adjectives could easily be applied to most of Sherald’s subjects, but they are not heiresses or art collectors or museum founders—and they are not white. The effect, the impact, is not the same. The best corollary within Sherald’s oeuvre to this traditional kind of portraiture—the only one, in fact—is her commissioned portrait of the forty-fourth first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama.

When Sherald’s portrait Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018) was unveiled, Obama emphasized to the audience that she did not come from a family whose members sat for portraits—like Whitney, who was also painted by John Everett Millais (at the age of thirteen) or her father, who was painted by John Singer Sargent. As Doreen St. Félix wrote in The New Yorker about the portrait, Obama was the first, a “variation of the classical American pioneer” in this and many other aspects.

The subject that Sherald presents is “a different Michelle, a woman evacuated of celebrity, who appears provisionally dreamlike, nearly a shadow,” St. Félix added. One could say she appears modern and direct, like Henri’s Whitney, but also gracious, private, self-contained, inward-looking—a feat of representation for one of the most famous, photographed and scrutinized women in the world, particularly as a Black woman.

Sherald’s Obama is comfortable, beholden only to herself—in a word, free. In this way, the painting places her in a liminal, “both/and” space—both everyday Black girl from the South Side of Chicago and ultimate African American first: a descendant of enslaved Africans in the White House. Sherald captured both sides of her persona, but the deeper sense of identification and commonality is with the artist’s usual subjects, everyday Black people, not the forty-three first ladies who preceded Obama.

Sherald’s subjects keep themselves to themselves, are quiet yet firm in presence and less concerned with how they are perceived beyond the frame than with their own interiority and imagination. This stands in stark contrast to the way images of Black people, and Black people themselves, more frequently exist in the world, which is to say externalized or made available for consumption. This is what Sherald calls the performance, the “public journey,” of Blackness.

Her mission with her work, as she once said in a conversation with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, has been to “[let] go of looking at people looking at [her]” and discover who she really is, thus giving others permission to do the same. She and her subjects are interested in the self that is liberated from the performance of race, gender, religion or other preconceived notions. To further her point, Sherald often uses phrases from literature as titles, quoting among others Jane Austen, Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison—all authors whose work was concerned with people oppressed in body, mind or spirit getting free.

In 1997, Sherald received her B.F.A. from Clark-Atlanta University, an H.B.C.U. in Atlanta. She had entered as a pre-med student, but in her junior year she switched to fine art, telling Vogue in 2009, “I had to do it. I came out from under the thumb of my mother, shaved my head, started dressing grunge, got a labret.” In school, she worked closely with Arturo Lindsay, a professor of art and art history at Spelman College, the women’s college and H.B.C.U. In 2004, she received her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. While there, she lived through a traumatic event: She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and later received a heart transplant.

In the years she lived in Baltimore, painting mystical, alien-like self-portraits, the discourse around Black artists was shifting, specifically in response to exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The year 2001 brought the landmark exhibition “Freestyle,” which proposed the idea of “post-Black”—a post-civil rights generation whose artists were, as the curator Thelma Golden put it, “adamant about not being labeled ‘Black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of Blackness.”

In 2002, the Studio Museum exhibition “Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art” was conceived to explore the “(mutual) exclusions perpetrated within the Black cultural community,” which is to say, to attempt to account for an entire parallel art world of contemporary Black artists working in “Black figurative imagery, romanticism, realism, and/or social realism.”

Many of the artists in the show had gone unnoticed and disparaged by mainstream art galleries, institutions and, at one time, perhaps by the Studio Museum itself, even as white artists working in figuration, like John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Lisa Yuskavage, were being celebrated. And yet the Black middle class loved the artists in question, providing them with commercial success and support via distinct circuits of distribution and value.

Describing this parallel art world, Golden said: “Their résumés speak to a world different from mine, populated with juried exhibitions, culturally specific and regional art spaces, corporate commissions and numerous awards and prizes.” In both the catalogue and critical reviews, the artists’ earnestness and apparent lack of irony were noted, as was their desire for their work to function as an antidote to “negative” images and conceptions of African Americans in art, popular culture and media.

After “Black Romantic,” the art world’s pendulum generally swung back toward the artists of the other stream, but two decades later, the distance between the two has shrunk considerably. Ernie Barnes, the real artist behind the paintings of the fictional character J.J. Evans in the 1970s sitcom “Good Times,” an artist whose direct-to-consumer selling of affordable prints was typical of the “Black Romantic” artists, is now posthumously represented by several mainstream galleries, and his paintings have commanded eye-watering prices in recent auctions. Kadir Nelson, another of the artists featured in the show, has frequently contributed cover artwork to publications such as The New Yorker and Ebony, and has illustrated children’s books by Debbie Allen, Will Smith and Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee. Kehinde Wiley, one of the few artists who straddled both art worlds at the time, was commissioned alongside Sherald to paint the companion portrait of President Barack Obama.

Though she was not in “Black Romantic,” Sherald resonates with those artists in her desire to capture the multivalence of being Black, of existing for and as ourselves—with seriousness, yes, but also with frivolity, wonder and lightheartedness—as wielders of the full spectrum of human experience.

A product of the American South, steeped in mainstream and African American art history and, on occasion, the juried exhibitions and prizes of Golden’s “parallel stream,” Sherald counts among her creative ancestors Hopper and his peers, but also Barnes and his. That such a distinction should have been made between two related approaches to American realism is telling of the racial bifurcations in American life and the difficulties African Americans have faced in finding their way as “fully realized entities on this planet,” as the curator Lowery Stokes Sims so memorably described the struggle.

The audacity of Sherald’s project is that it privileges self-regard and realization over everything, even the shackles of history—which is not the same as ignoring or denying history and its impacts. Forged in the crucible of her own mortality and through the strength of her ambition to portray what she has called the “wonder of what it is to be a Black American,” Sherald renders a rich Black world, unconstrained and untrammeled.

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“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on November 16, 2024, and will remain on view through March 9, 2025, before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Known for her use of grisaille in the depiction of her subjects, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. In 2017, Sherald was invited to paint the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. Her work can be found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She lives and works in the greater New York area.

Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the curator of the retrospective “Julie Mehretu” (2021), and co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined” (2017) and “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017” (2017).