This painting marked a turning point for American artist Amy Sherald in 2018, just after the national attention surrounding her portrait of Michelle Obama. It was the first work she made after that historic commission and one of the first in which her imagined world opened into a full landscape. Sherald said she had wanted for years to place figures in an open field, and the rocket arrived as a symbol of “unlimited potential,” but also as something coded in American culture as white and male. Here, she reclaims that symbolic space. Two young Black women stand barefoot in a wide field of dry yellow grass, seen mostly from behind as they hold hands. The woman at right turns her head back toward us, with a calm, direct, slightly questioning gaze. The other looks forward toward a rocket launch in the distance. Sherald paints both figures in her signature grayscale rather than naturalistic skin color, while their clothing carries vivid life. The woman on the left wears a white shirt with a high-waisted blue skirt. The other wears a striped dress in bright bands of pink, orange, yellow, and green, with a white bow at her hair. At the far left, a rocket lifts into the sky, its plume running almost like a vertical white scar or beacon beside them. The horizon sits low, making the sky feel immense and the figures quietly monumental. The two sitters were not celebrities but women Sherald met through a Baltimore school community, one a teacher and one a graduate, which matters. Everyday Black life, not spectacle, is the center of the picture. Their joined hands suggest solidarity, intimacy, and shared witness. The title stretches between machinery and mystery as well as between earthly limits and mental freedom. Sherald turns the “spaces in between” into a zone of dreaming, self-possession, and possibility for an image of Black womanhood not under scrutiny, but already sovereign.

"Planes, rockets, and the spaces in between" by Amy Sherald (American) - Oil on canvas / 2018 - Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, Maryland) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #AmySherald #Sherald #BaltimoreMuseumOfArt #artBMA #BMA #art #artText #BlackArt #AmericanArt #BlackArtist #WomenArtists

Amy Sherald reclaims the American portrait—elegance, poise, and belonging once reserved for others.Kehinde Wiley revives Classical silence, turning visibility into power and presence into reclamation;my essay:
krishinasnani.substack.com/p/american-s...
#Sherald #Wiley #BlackArt #ArtHistory #Culture

A tall Black woman stands against a vivid, turquoise-blue ground mottled with faint, watery red drips. American artist Amy Sherald renders her skin in nuanced grays of soft charcoal, pewter, and silver so that tonal shifts depict her cheekbones, brows, and hands. Her gaze meets ours directly, steady and calm. She wears a short-sleeved, pink blouse scattered with small white polka dots and tied with a large bow at the collar, paired with a plain white skirt. Her bare arms rest alongside her body. Her short natural hair forms a simple silhouette. The composition gives primacy to presence, poise, and style. Painted soon after Sherald completed her training in Baltimore, this work marks the emergence of key strategies that would define her practice. She had encountered the sitter, a curatorial intern at the Walters Art Museum, and was struck by her height, hairstyle, and thrifted polka-dot outfit: “I saw my story in her,” Sherald recalls. Photographing the model and then translating the likeness to paint, she eliminated place to focus on personhood. The grayscale skin is a deliberate nod to the history of black-and-white photography and self-representation. Sherald refuses to let color stand in for race, inviting viewers to read character, not stereotype. The title, lifted from a poem, functions like one of Sherald’s “small poems,” offering a runway into the painting’s psychology: a subject who is impeccably composed yet out of step with rigid social expectations. The speckled blue ground, with its faint reddish drips, signals an earlier phase in Sherald’s evolution, before she moved toward flatter planes of color; nevertheless, the essentials are here: stylish self-presentation, quiet authority, and a reparative re-centering of Black life. Sherald has said her mission is “to put more complex stories of Black life in the forefront of people’s minds and on the walls of museums…to take up space and reclaim time.”

“Well Prepared and Maladjusted” by Amy Sherald (American) – Oil on canvas / 2008 – Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) #WomenInArt #WomenPaintingWomen #WomenArtists #art #artText #artwork #WomensArt #AfricanAmericanArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #WhitneyMuseumofAmericanArt #AmySherald #Sherald

Renowned American artist Amy Sherald uses her signature gray tones to depict a front-facing Black youth with short natural hair standing centered against a flat, pale blue background. The figure wears a knee-length, short-sleeve red shift dress boldly printed with a large cream silhouette of a bird in mid-flight across the torso, and a white heart near the hem. Their arms hang straight at the sides, hands relaxed. The lighting is even; edges are crisp; there are no cast shadows, emphasizing calm, direct presence. This portrait draws upon an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem, invoking the bird as emblem of endurance, inner resilience, and hope across storms. The figure is a dancer from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, whom Sherald spotted on stage; Sherald was compelled by her presence and spirit. Sherald’s technique is key to the painting’s power. She regularly paints Black subjects using grisaille (rendering skin tones in a spectrum of grays) set against bold monochromatic or vibrantly colored backgrounds. Skin color becomes not the spotlight, but a way to mediate visibility, identity, race, and presence. The figure’s dress, richly patterned with a soaring bird motif, becomes a carrier of symbolic meaning: the bird in Dickinson’s poem “perches in the soul” and “sings the tune without the words,” a metaphor Sherald amplifies through visual form. This work was part of Sherald’s “The Great American Fact” exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, where she sought to represent Black life not as tragedy or spectacle but ordinary, luminous, full: the “dash” of life between exclamation points and periods. Sherald has spoken of resisting the framing of Black life as primarily grief or struggle, instead painting moments of leisure, presence, dignity, and hope. The bird motif, the posture and glance, the interplay of clothes, light, pattern, and background all suggest a quiet yet unyielding optimism: hope does not demand reward, does not ask for acknowledgment, but persists.

"Hope is the thing with feathers (The Little Bird)" by Amy Sherald (American) - Oil on linen / 2021 - Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles, California) #WomenInArt #WomanArtist #FemalePainter #AmySherald #Sherald #art #artwork #artText #BlueskyArt #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #hope #WomensArt #WomenArtists

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American as apple pie

Like many contemporary American artists Amy Sherald perceives racial identity as a performance in response to external forces rather than an essential attribute. As one of just a few Black children in her private school in Georgia, she recalls being highly conscious of how she spoke and dressed, believing these behaviors were the key to social acceptance and assimilation. "They call me Redbone, but I’d rather be Strawberry Shortcake" alludes to racial labeling directly, as the slang term “redbone” typically refers to a Black woman with a light skin tone. Sherald modifies historical portrait formats to upend the dominant narrative of African American history. She notes: “I 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.” While historical portraitists aimed to reveal a sitter’s social standing or some essence of character, Sherald’s haunting figures are expressionless and dressed in unusual, costume-style clothing that she has collected. Typical of Sherald’s art, the young woman in "They call me Redbone, but I’d rather be Strawberry Shortcake" appears to float against an intensely colored background, which enhances the work’s dreamy quality. The artist achieves this effect by limiting her use shadow along the figure’s contours. Here as in other works, Sherald disrupts viewers’ readings of her portrait subjects as Black by painting their skin in grayscale, metaphorically removing their “color.”

"They call me Redbone, but I’d rather be Strawberry Shortcake" by Amy Sherald (American) - Oil on canvas / 2009 - National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC) #womeninart #womanartist #art #oilpainting #portraitofawoman #AmySherald #Sherald #womensart #NMWA #NationalMuseumofWomenintheArts

Original post on culturetype.com

Pivotal Portrait by Amy Sherald Graces Cover of New Yorker in Advance of Major Survey at Whitney […]

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As soft as she is... 2023 by Amy #Sherald

Exhibition "When We See Us –
A Century of Black Figuration in Painting" at Kunstmuseum Basel.