Amy Sherald

Painter Amy Sherald is displaying new work at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in LA through June 6: The Great American Fact. One thing I really notice in her art now, after watching the excellent documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light, is how at least one person in her paintings is looking directly at the viewer. Here’s Sherald talking about that in the documentary:

We live in between the lines; in between the cracks of black and white. That’s where the bonds are formed. Amy Sherald’s much anticipated exhibition entitled The Great American Fact at Hauser and Wirth does not disappoint. In the vast space of the gallery are five bold, ambitious, meticulously crafted paintings whose scale and narrative are visually compelling. Completed during the pandemic year of 2020, these works are paradoxically part of this politically charged moment but also seek to transcend it. These five paintings are an oasis of calm, serenity and quietude, portraying Black Americans in bucolic and fictionalized landscapes.

Installation view, ‘Amy Sherald. The Great American Fact,’ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 2021 © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. LOS ANGELES, CA.- Amy Sherald, one of America’s defining contemporary portraitists, unveiled new paintings in her first West Coast solo exhibition. On...

Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. The Speed Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture are negotiating to jointly purchase Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black medical worker who was killed by the police last year in a botched raid on her Louisville apartment. Commissioned for the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair, the painting will go on view at the Speed on 7 April in Promise, Witness, Remembrance, a show honouring Taylor that explores racism, police killings of Black Americans and the resulting wave of protests. The two museums are buying the painting with $1m donated by the Ford Foundation and the newly-formed Hearthland Foundation, which supports social justice initiatives. Sherald told The NewYork Times that she intends to use the proceeds from the sale to fund a programme supporting aspiring college students with an interest in social justice.

Walking into the galleries at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles right now is like walking into summer. A new suite of just five paintings (three quite large) by Amy Sherald radiate from the broad clean walls, where her subjects pose with sunflowers and bicycles and flowing blue dresses, surf gear, muscle cars, kitten heels and sunshine. It’s a pageant of gloriously ordinary American life. All the people in the paintings are Black; all the simple blue-sky pleasures on offer are universal.

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes artist Amy Sherald, whose new exhibit “The Great American Fact” is currently on display at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Sherald painted the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama and her portrait of Breonna Taylor was the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair. Sherald tells The Treatment that her signature blue-green color was in part inspired by the colors she saw in the hospital awaiting a heart transplant. She says she paints what she wants to see in the world and wants her paintings to take up a lot of space. And, Sherald tells The Treatment why she and director Wes Anderson are kindred spirits.

Amy Sherald paintings: Celebrated artist, who painted Michelle Obama for Smithsonian and Breonna Taylor for Vanity Fair, opens free solo West Coast show and 'The Climb 2' Is A Thrilling VR Free Solo Adventure That Doubles As An Arm Workout. Last News:. 'The Climb 2' Is A Thrilling VR Free...

Through June 6, 2021, Amy Sherald, one of America’s defining contemporary portraitists, will unveil new paintings in her first West Coast solo exhibition. On view at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Arts District complex in Los Angeles, ‘The Great American Fact’ presents five works produced in 2020 that extend the artist’s technical innovations and distinctive visual language. Sherald is acclaimed for paintings of Black Americans at leisure that achieve the authority of landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture – a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, and families whose lives have been inextricable from the narrative of the American experience. Subverting the genre of portraiture and challenging accepted notions of American identity, Sherald attempts to restore a broader, fuller picture of humanity. She positions her subjects as ‘symbolic tools that shift perceptions of who we are as Americans, while transforming the walls of museum galleries and the canon of art history – American art history, to be more specific.’

Artist Amy Sherald skyrocketed to fame in 2017 when the National Portrait Gallery commissioned her to paint former First Lady Michelle Obama's official portrait. Regarding her signature approach to painting Black subjects in grayscale, Sherald told colossal.com, “A Black person on a canvas is automatically read as radical. My figures needed to be pushed into the world in a universal way, where they could become a part of the mainstream art historical narrative. I knew I didn’t want it to be about identity alone.”

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky has released more details on what will be included in its forthcoming exhibition devoted to Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency room technician who was fatally shot by police during a botched raid in her apartment last March. Promise, Witness, Remembrance (7 April-6 June) will span five galleries that typically house the museum’s Dutch and Flemish collection, and feature works by Amy Sherald, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nick Cave, Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, Kerry James Marshall, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Nari Ward, and Hank Willis Thomas, among other artists.

Furthering social justice reform efforts, artist Amy Sherald painted a portrait of Breonna Taylor that will be acquired by two major museums. These include the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky that was scheduled to display the portrait later this year.

Amy Sherald is well known today as the artist who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait in 2018 for the National Portrait Gallery. Her oil portraits of Black Americans, observed on the streets of Baltimore from 2001 to 2018, can now be found in museums, galleries, and private collections internationally. Her stated purpose for her work is “to create playful yet sober portraits of Black Americans within an imaginative history where I do black my way, in the European tradition of painted portraiture.” Her paintings have a similar format that includes a single female or male figure in three-quarter view. Figures generally stand calmly facing the viewer, their eyes making contact. Each figure is painted wearing brightly colored clothing and placed in front of an empty background painted a mottled solid color. There is a touch of humor and fantasy, as Sherald presents the figures “to create work that would encourage people to see themselves outside of their everyday environment and life style.” Visually her work sends a message, but her titles, which are narratives, add a significant message that sets up a dialogue between the figure and the viewer.

Viewers at former first lady Michelle Obama’s official portrait by Amy Sherald, unveiling at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 11, 2018. After painting a portrait of Breonna Taylor, whose killing by police helped galvanize national protests, Sherald decided she wanted the work to live on in public. Mark Makela/The New York Times.

“Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018, oil on linen.” That’s the caption for Amy Sherald’s most famous painting to date—which is also, to date, the most famous painting of the 21st century. The 47-year-old, Georgia native sprang into the limelight in 2017 when she was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to create the official portrait of the former first lady. Being awarded such a monumental commission was very much a personal win for the artist, who had already achieved success—if not exactly fame—for her stark yet vivid figurative oil paintings of Black subjects, often positioned staring straight ahead in the canvas’s center foreground, still as statues, possessed with awe, defiance, and beauty.

Amy Sherald, one of America’s most significant modern portraitists, will debut a new collection of paintings in her first solo exhibition on the West Coast, opening March 20 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. “The Great American Fact” consists of five works produced in 2020 that encompass Sherald’s technical innovations and distinctive visual language to center Black Americans in scenes of leisure surrounded by stillness. Sherald notes her subjects are positioned as “symbolic tools that shift perceptions of who we are as Americans, while transforming the walls of museum galleries and the canon of art history–American art history, to be more specific.” The show will be open for viewing through June 6, 2021 in the museum’s South Gallery.

During the tumultuous year of 2020, Amy Sherald continued to paint portraits of everyday, contemporary African Americans—elevating and revealing the story of the Black experience. The five vivid portraits she created will be shown in Sherald’s first West Coast solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles South gallery next...