Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald is an American painter best known for her portraits of African Americans, which explore identity, representation and the experience of contemporary Black life in the United States. Combining carefully staged compositions with vivid backgrounds and figures rendered in grayscale, she has developed a recognisable visual language that reinvents conventional approaches to portraiture. She gained international recognition in 2018 when her official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1973, Sherald developed an interest in art at an early age. Her decision to pursue painting as a career was reinforced by seeing Object Permanence (1986), a work by American artist Bo Bartlett that featured a Black figure. She received a BA in painting from Clark Atlanta University in 1997, followed by an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2004. During her studies, she also participated in Spelman College’s International Artist-in-Residence programme in Panama.

After completing her education, the artist began to move away from autobiographical subjects towards portraits examining African American cultural history and the representation of Black identity. In 2012, she adopted her signature grisaille technique, depicting her sitters’ skin in shades of grey rather than naturalistic tones. Inspired partly by old family photographs, this approach encourages viewers to look beyond conventional associations between skin colour and racial identity. In A Clear Unspoken Granted Magic (2017), which achieved US$4,101,000 at Christie’s New York in 2025, the sitter’s monochromatic complexion is set against a vibrant turquoise background, with a boldly patterned outfit drawing attention to her presence. Such carefully considered combinations of clothing and saturated backgrounds are characteristic of Sherald’s portraits, which bring together familiar elements of everyday life with an otherworldly quality.

A major breakthrough came in 2016, when Sherald became the first African American and first woman to win the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014). Two years later, she was commissioned to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait, becoming the first African American artist to receive the honour. Her subsequent portrait of Breonna Taylor, created in 2020, further established her position in contemporary American portraiture. Sherald received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2017 and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in 2019.