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Lot Essay
“…the people in Sherald’s paintings repopulate the archive of American iconography for a new generation of citizens.” Dario Calmese
Standing with her arms crossed and staring defiantly out from the surface of the canvas, the subject of Amy Sherald’s striking painting A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic truly conveys the power of the artist’s portraiture. Sherald renders her subjects in monochromatic tones and without the trappings of power, status, or success historically associated with the genre. By removing these extraneous details, the artist accentuates her subject’s presence, in the process reversing the power dynamic that has dominated the art historical canon for centuries. Thus, she gives a voice to subjects who have all too often been ignored: “…the people in Sherald’s paintings repopulate the archive of American iconography for a new generation of citizens, and from the point of view of those who were not always constitutionally seen as such” (D. Calmese, “Beyond Flesh,” in S. Roberts (ed.), Amy Sherald: American Sublime, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2024, p. 45).
Sherald’s ostensibly restrained composition in reality hides many complex layers of meaning and representation. Against a vibrant turquoise ground, Sherald depicts a three-quarter length composition of a young woman. Wearing a skirt with a bold geometric print and a white top, the only splash of color is provided by the bold floral scarf that she wears around her neck. In this fashion, Sherald focuses attention on the woman’s face staring impassively out of the picture and conveys the entire personality of her sitter in elegant grayscale.
Painted in 2017, the bold pattern on the sitter’s dress is a precursor to the dress worn by Michelle Obama in Sherald’s official portrait of the First Lady commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. the following year. Despite the significance of the sitter, for Sherald there is one important factor in Obama’s portrait. “[It is] the dress,” she says of the Obama portrait, “I’m deeply in love with the dress. It’s the red, the pink, the yellow and then the black and gray. I wanted the dress to have some kind of symbolism in and of itself” (A. Sherald, CBS 60 Minutes, October, 19 2025, online [accessed: 10/20/2025]). Similarly, in the present work, the boldness of the patten adds to the forcefulness of the subject, while at the same time the strict geometry of the pattern emphasizes the humanity in the woman’s face.
The defining aspect of Sherald’s paintings in her use of grayscale. Giotto used the technique that came to known as grisaille as early as 1304 in his frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Subsequently, artists from Hans Memling, Anthony van Dyck, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres have adopted a monochromatic palette as a way of establishing form, volume and tonal values. Historically, this was done to ensure that the final composition has a strong structure of light and shadow, resulting in a realistic three-dimensional appearance. But for Sherald it has a very personal and a very contemporary purpose. Like the Old Masters before her, she began using the technique to model her figures, but she quickly incorporated it into her paintings as part of the finished composition. At first, she liked the way the grayscale looked, reminding her of old black-and-white photographs she had of her grandmother, but subsequently she realized that this technique also provided an interesting new way for people to view her subjects.
As all of her subjects are Black, Sherald was concerned that that would the first thing that her audience would see. She didn’t want her paintings to be marginalized, and felt that accurate depictions of brown skin would allow people to put them in the “black corner” as she describes it. Painting en grisaille allowed people to see the humanity in her subjects, allowing the viewer to stop, pause, and consider something beyond the brown skin. “Rendered in tones of gray, and inspired by the faded black-and-white photographs found in her childhood home, Amy dissolves the flesh and removes the sign, allowing us space to contemplate the ever-evolving essence of what is signified…” (D. Calmese, “Beyond Flesh,” op. cit., p. 47). “[The] lack of color allows for a different entry point,” she explains (Ibid.).
Photography is an important element in Sherald’s practice. Using friends, acquaintances, and people she sees on the street, the artist invites them into the studio where she dresses them in clothes she has acquired in thrift stores before photographing them in different poses. Her inspiration often comes from popular culture, such as her 2022 painting For Love, and for Country which is based on the famous VJ Day in Times Square photograph by Alfred Eisnestaedt in which a sailor kisses a white-uniform clad nurse. Sherald has said that her paintings are often “a meditation on photography” (A. Sherald, quoted by T. Bravo, “Amy Sherald offers he own definition of ‘Americanness’ with SFMOMA exhibition,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 25, 2024, online [accessed: 10/21/2025]).
Sherald is one of the most compelling and dynamic figurative painters working today. Born in Columbus, Georgia, she developed an early interest in art, learning to draw during recess at school. She decided that she wanted to become an artist after seeing a painting by the American Realist painter Bo Bartlett called Object Permanence (1986, Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus State University), realizing that it included the first Black face she had ever seen in a painting. “What was so shocking when I first went to a museum, was to find out that art wasn’t something in a book, in an encyclopedia, that people did a long time ago, that it was real life. And then, when I saw an image of a person of color, it all came together in that moment—that this was something real, that somebody created this who was still alive and the same time I was alive” (A. Sherald, “A Conversation with 2019 NAEA National Convention Keynote Speaker Amy Sherald,” Art Education, Vol. 72, No. 2, March 2019, pp. 51-54).
Determined to be an artist, she waited tables until she was in her 30s. She is an alumnus of Clark-Atlanta University, before taking painting classes at Spelman College and participating in their International Artist-in-Residence program in Lima, Peru in 1997. In 2013, she held her first museum retrospective organized by the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in Baltimore, and in 2019 her first major retrospective was organized by Spelman College. In 2024, the artist’s Amy Sherald: American Sublime opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025 and opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art in November 2025.
Amy Sherald’s portraits are a timely and powerful reinvention of a very traditional genre. They are also intensely personal to the artist, the sitter, and the viewer. Her technical skill is unquestioned, but it is her painting’s perceptive and inquisitive nature that makes her portraits special. In works such as A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic she is not merely recording a person’s appearance or even their social status, she is identifying and celebrating their humanity. Ironically, by paring back extraneous painterly details she is capturing what ultimately makes us human. “I don’t think these portraits are confrontational,” she says, “but they are present. They want you to sit with them and have an exchange.” (A. Sherald, CBS 60 Minutes, October, 19 2025, online [accessed: 10/20/2025]).
Standing with her arms crossed and staring defiantly out from the surface of the canvas, the subject of Amy Sherald’s striking painting A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic truly conveys the power of the artist’s portraiture. Sherald renders her subjects in monochromatic tones and without the trappings of power, status, or success historically associated with the genre. By removing these extraneous details, the artist accentuates her subject’s presence, in the process reversing the power dynamic that has dominated the art historical canon for centuries. Thus, she gives a voice to subjects who have all too often been ignored: “…the people in Sherald’s paintings repopulate the archive of American iconography for a new generation of citizens, and from the point of view of those who were not always constitutionally seen as such” (D. Calmese, “Beyond Flesh,” in S. Roberts (ed.), Amy Sherald: American Sublime, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2024, p. 45).
Sherald’s ostensibly restrained composition in reality hides many complex layers of meaning and representation. Against a vibrant turquoise ground, Sherald depicts a three-quarter length composition of a young woman. Wearing a skirt with a bold geometric print and a white top, the only splash of color is provided by the bold floral scarf that she wears around her neck. In this fashion, Sherald focuses attention on the woman’s face staring impassively out of the picture and conveys the entire personality of her sitter in elegant grayscale.
Painted in 2017, the bold pattern on the sitter’s dress is a precursor to the dress worn by Michelle Obama in Sherald’s official portrait of the First Lady commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. the following year. Despite the significance of the sitter, for Sherald there is one important factor in Obama’s portrait. “[It is] the dress,” she says of the Obama portrait, “I’m deeply in love with the dress. It’s the red, the pink, the yellow and then the black and gray. I wanted the dress to have some kind of symbolism in and of itself” (A. Sherald, CBS 60 Minutes, October, 19 2025, online [accessed: 10/20/2025]). Similarly, in the present work, the boldness of the patten adds to the forcefulness of the subject, while at the same time the strict geometry of the pattern emphasizes the humanity in the woman’s face.
The defining aspect of Sherald’s paintings in her use of grayscale. Giotto used the technique that came to known as grisaille as early as 1304 in his frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Subsequently, artists from Hans Memling, Anthony van Dyck, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres have adopted a monochromatic palette as a way of establishing form, volume and tonal values. Historically, this was done to ensure that the final composition has a strong structure of light and shadow, resulting in a realistic three-dimensional appearance. But for Sherald it has a very personal and a very contemporary purpose. Like the Old Masters before her, she began using the technique to model her figures, but she quickly incorporated it into her paintings as part of the finished composition. At first, she liked the way the grayscale looked, reminding her of old black-and-white photographs she had of her grandmother, but subsequently she realized that this technique also provided an interesting new way for people to view her subjects.
As all of her subjects are Black, Sherald was concerned that that would the first thing that her audience would see. She didn’t want her paintings to be marginalized, and felt that accurate depictions of brown skin would allow people to put them in the “black corner” as she describes it. Painting en grisaille allowed people to see the humanity in her subjects, allowing the viewer to stop, pause, and consider something beyond the brown skin. “Rendered in tones of gray, and inspired by the faded black-and-white photographs found in her childhood home, Amy dissolves the flesh and removes the sign, allowing us space to contemplate the ever-evolving essence of what is signified…” (D. Calmese, “Beyond Flesh,” op. cit., p. 47). “[The] lack of color allows for a different entry point,” she explains (Ibid.).
Photography is an important element in Sherald’s practice. Using friends, acquaintances, and people she sees on the street, the artist invites them into the studio where she dresses them in clothes she has acquired in thrift stores before photographing them in different poses. Her inspiration often comes from popular culture, such as her 2022 painting For Love, and for Country which is based on the famous VJ Day in Times Square photograph by Alfred Eisnestaedt in which a sailor kisses a white-uniform clad nurse. Sherald has said that her paintings are often “a meditation on photography” (A. Sherald, quoted by T. Bravo, “Amy Sherald offers he own definition of ‘Americanness’ with SFMOMA exhibition,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 25, 2024, online [accessed: 10/21/2025]).
Sherald is one of the most compelling and dynamic figurative painters working today. Born in Columbus, Georgia, she developed an early interest in art, learning to draw during recess at school. She decided that she wanted to become an artist after seeing a painting by the American Realist painter Bo Bartlett called Object Permanence (1986, Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus State University), realizing that it included the first Black face she had ever seen in a painting. “What was so shocking when I first went to a museum, was to find out that art wasn’t something in a book, in an encyclopedia, that people did a long time ago, that it was real life. And then, when I saw an image of a person of color, it all came together in that moment—that this was something real, that somebody created this who was still alive and the same time I was alive” (A. Sherald, “A Conversation with 2019 NAEA National Convention Keynote Speaker Amy Sherald,” Art Education, Vol. 72, No. 2, March 2019, pp. 51-54).
Determined to be an artist, she waited tables until she was in her 30s. She is an alumnus of Clark-Atlanta University, before taking painting classes at Spelman College and participating in their International Artist-in-Residence program in Lima, Peru in 1997. In 2013, she held her first museum retrospective organized by the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in Baltimore, and in 2019 her first major retrospective was organized by Spelman College. In 2024, the artist’s Amy Sherald: American Sublime opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025 and opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art in November 2025.
Amy Sherald’s portraits are a timely and powerful reinvention of a very traditional genre. They are also intensely personal to the artist, the sitter, and the viewer. Her technical skill is unquestioned, but it is her painting’s perceptive and inquisitive nature that makes her portraits special. In works such as A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic she is not merely recording a person’s appearance or even their social status, she is identifying and celebrating their humanity. Ironically, by paring back extraneous painterly details she is capturing what ultimately makes us human. “I don’t think these portraits are confrontational,” she says, “but they are present. They want you to sit with them and have an exchange.” (A. Sherald, CBS 60 Minutes, October, 19 2025, online [accessed: 10/20/2025]).