Amy Sherald’s practice attends to the diverse African American experience in the United States. Looking to the history of photography and portraiture, she generates a visual dialogue around registers of representation. Sherald is particularly known for her use of grayscale to paint skin tones as a means of upending associations between race and skin colour. Michelle Obama selected Sherald to create her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery; from 2021 to 2022, First Lady Michelle Obama was part of the touring exhibition The Obama Portraits, which showed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, among others.
Sherald was born in Columbus, GA, and now lives in the Greater New York Area. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In 2019, she was awarded the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award and her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.