Now that's a strong and classy First Lady! #MicelleObama

Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Sherald focuses on African American cultural history and the representation of the African American body. She uses a grayscale to paint skin tones as a way of challenging the concept of color as race. This grayscale technique, also called grisaille, is connected to the artist’s early personal experiences. Sherald, who was born in Columbus, Georgia, remembers looking at family photo albums as a child and getting to know her grandmother Jewel through a black-and-white photograph. She was captivated by her grandmother’s beauty, self-possession, and confident, direct gaze in the photograph. When Sherald looked for painted portraits of people who looked like her in art history books in local libraries, she realized that her family’s story was absent in the history of painted portraiture. She was also discouraged when she did not find people who looked like her in the public spaces of museums. Sherald’s larger project of painting portraits of African Americans seeks to make up for this absence by addressing the history of representation. She has notably described her paintings as a “meditation on photography.” Her subjects are often set in whimsical, nondescript settings with occasional surreal details that add a bit of satire. The dreamlike backgrounds create what the artist refers to as “the amorphous personal space of my own existence within the context of black identity and my search for ways to clarify and ground it.”

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Amy Sherald (American, b.1973) • Portrait of Michelle Obama • 2018 • National Portrait Gallery (see ALT text) #MicelleObama #Portrait #AmericanArtist #painting #art #AmySherald #WomanArtist #BlackAmericanArtist #NationalPortraitGallery #ContemporaryPainting