Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama’s Portraitist, Readies her New York Debut

IN 2012, WHEN AMY SHERALD was 39, she collapsed in a Baltimore Rite Aid. The artist had been diagnosed eight years earlier with idiopathic cardiomyopathy—a disease of the heart muscle that makes it difficult for the organ to pump blood—and had been told that she would need a heart transplant. At the time, it hadn’t seemed urgent. She was in great physical shape, training to compete in a triathlon, and she was about to get her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Now, suddenly, she was in the hospital at Johns Hopkins, waiting for the transplant. By a cruel irony, her beloved younger brother, Michael, was dying from non–smoking related lung cancer in Georgia. “I knew at that point I had to live,” Sherald tells me, “because my mom couldn’t lose two children within weeks.” Eleven days after Michael died, Sherald got a new heart and a new life.

Sherald, of course, is the artist behind the now famous official portrait of Michelle Obama that hangs in the Smithsonian. But when she was chosen for the commission, in 2016, she was still largely unknown. Kehinde Wiley, the artist selected to paint President Obama’s portrait, was an art-world star. His bold, heroic portraits of black subjects in poses that channel the Old Masters were on the must-have lists of savvy collectors. Sherald, on the other hand, was a 43-year-old African American artist who lived and worked in Baltimore. She painted vivid, head-on portraits of people she met on the street (and photographed)—“an American realist, painting American people doing American things,” she tells me. Her name had surfaced in front of the Obamas because she had recently won the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a contest open to any professional artist working in the United States. She is the first woman and the first African American to win it.

Sherald’s painting of the former First Lady is larger than life and gloriously untraditional. Michelle sits facing us, chin resting on one hand, arms bare, rising from a mountainous, floor-length white skirt with geometric patterns in black, red, pink, and yellow. But the critical response was mixed. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter thought the dress outperformed the person. He wrote, “Mrs. Obama’s face . . . could be almost anyone’s face, like a model’s face in a fashion spread.” New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz disagreed. “She is grand, elegant, gorgeous, but her jackrabbit-quick wit is right there.” The most indelible reaction came from two-year-old Parker Curry, who was photographed standing in front of the painting, a look of awed enchantment on her face. “She’s a queen,” Parker told her mother; her reaction, and the painting itself, went viral. To me, the image captures not only the power and spirit of the subject, but also the hope and promise that Michelle Obama embodies, and art’s ability to encompass that.

With a mile-wide smile and a warm hug, Sherald lets me into her Jersey City studio in Mana Contemporary, the two-million-square-foot former tobacco factory that’s now a hive of artist spaces. She introduces me to August Wilson, her Pekingese–Jack Russell: “He’s the perfect balance of a dog,” she says as she prepares him a plate of grain–and–gluten free dinner patties. “Most Jack Russells are a little neurotic, kind of hyper. But he’s really chill.”

The studio is divided into three rooms, one of which is lined with canvases in various stages of development. Kelli Ryan, her studio assistant, is busy priming the two biggest ones (about ten feet tall, the largest she’s ever done) with Napthol Scarlet. “It’s my base,” she explains. “Somebody told me this is what the Old Masters did, and I like the way it warms up the whole image when I paint over it.” The paintings are all headed for her debut solo show next month in New York at Hauser & Wirth, the mega-gallery that now represents her worldwide. Ever since The Portrait, Sherald’s mother, Geraldine, who never thought she could survive as an artist, has been “driving the bandwagon,” Sherald tells me with an affectionate laugh. “She says, ‘I always knew my daughter was going to be an amazing artist.’”

Two slightly smaller paintings are further along. Each one shows a standing woman looking straight at us, in a colorfully patterned dress. They both have the same dark-gray skin tone—a mixture of black and Naples Yellow—that Sherald gives to all her subjects. “It feels more powerful than if I painted the skin brown,” she says. Half a dozen photographs are pinned to a wall. “This guy is an Alvin Ailey dancer,” she says. “This one is Keoma, August’s nanny and dog-walker, and this is a guy I met on the subway.”

She recently moved to New Jersey, she explains, “for love.” Last September she began living with Kevin Pemberton, a Brooklyn-born hedge funder, in a house that’s a short drive from Mana Contemporary. A mutual friend introduced them ten years ago, but nothing clicked until last year. “I hated to leave Baltimore, because my heart is there,” she says. “But his career is not portable.” They go out a lot—Kevin likes to try new restaurants. They also love to go salsa dancing, and to the American Ballet Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, where they recently saw the South African soprano Pretty Yende in La Fille du Régiment. The other night they went to Shakespeare in the Park and saw an all-black cast in Much Ado About Nothing. “It’s amazing to walk into these spaces,” “and see performers and performances created by people who look like you.”

Sherald was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, the third of four children. Her father was a dentist, but when Sherald was seven, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which ended his practice. “We were doing well, and then we were not doing well, because there was no money,” she says. To make ends meet, her all-conquering mother, who had been a housewife, became a bank manager, and Sherald took over a lot of the housework and looked after her younger brother, Michael. “Our house had woods behind it, so we’d walk back there and explore and set traps for raccoons and do crazy stuff.” The family went to church every Saturday, a strict fundamentalist sect called the Worldwide Church of God, which forbids celebrating Christmas, Easter, or birthdays, and bans TV from Friday night to Saturday night.

She was introduced to art through the family’s encyclopedia, where she would study reproduced paintings. At school, she was the only black kid in her class, and she stayed at her desk during recess because she liked to draw in a quiet room. She took private lessons from her school art teacher straight through to 12th grade. But when she announced that she wanted to be an artist, both her parents balked—they wanted her to be a doctor. She became a premed student at Clark Atlanta University, but at the start of her junior year, she changed her major to fine art. “I had to do it,” she says. “I came out from under the thumb of my mother, shaved my head, started dressing grunge, got a labret” (a piercing below the lower lip). She moved to Maryland for her M.F.A., and spent a few months after she graduated apprenticing in Norway with Odd Nerdrum. And then, instead of heading for New York, as most M.F.A. grads do, she returned to Baltimore, which would be her home base, off and on, for the next 13 years.

Becoming an artist, for Sherald, was a long battle against heavy odds—there was her own health and her brother’s death, and in 2005, her mother had asked her to return to Georgia to help care for her ailing aunts. That trip turned into a four-year stay. When she finally returned to Baltimore, she waitressed five nights a week to pay for her $300-a-month studio in a boarded-up old car garage that had no air-conditioning or heat. She would paint in her underwear in the summer and freeze in the winter, working until her fingers got numb. And then, in 2016, recognition started to come: $25,000 for winning the National Portrait Gallery competition; her first museum solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; a mural commission in Philadelphia; Michelle Obama’s portrait.

We meet again four days later, at the Crosby Street Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Sherald arrives right on time, pulling up in a bright-yellow Kia. Her hyperefficient studio manager and life organizer, Alexander Dorr, is waiting on the curb to park the car, and she steps out wearing a stylish vintage leopard coat with black leather pants by Theory. Clothes are a major element in her paintings—she outfits her subjects in bold patterns (wide, bright-colored stripes, polka dots, geometric shapes), which she picks up on eBay and in secondhand stores.

The first time we met, Sherald had spoken mainly about her past, but today she’s more forward-thinking and tells me that she and Kevin plan to get married. (She’s already picked out her wedding dress.) Sherald had settled into the idea that she would never have children, but meeting Kevin changed that. They’ve started going to a fertility clinic. “In my mind, Kevin was the banker with the fast car and all the chicks,” she says, “and I was just the artist from Baltimore who was a waitress. I have a little bit of an impostor syndrome. My life has changed, but I’m still a little black girl from the South, raised in a small town, who grew up in a church that was kind of weird. I’m not going to take myself too seriously, because I realize it just kind of happened. I worked hard, it came, and this is a fun ride.” I can’t resist asking if she would consider another commission. “Not unless it’s Meghan Markle,” she says, laughing. Keoma, the dog nanny, arrives and drops off August Wilson, who takes residence under the table. Sherald orders a plate of chicken for him—“no seasonings.” He turns up his nose at it.

Toward the end of lunch, Sherald tells me about a pivotal moment in her career. In 2007, she came to New York to see Kara Walker’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum. “It was riveting and amazing and disturbing in all the right ways,” she tells me, “but afterward I was trying to process it within my own experience, the experience of a black girl growing up in the South—because she also grew up there. And I realized in that moment there was no conversation happening around just black people being black. It was everything but that. Culturally we’re presented in one way. It’s like, Africa, slave boat, slave, civil rights, President Obama.” She bursts out laughing. “And that’s supposed to be the happy ending. But there are so many different tropes of who we are, and how we exist, and all that needs to be expressed, as well.” Any life, she came to realize, is filled with multiple narratives, some of them quite frivolous. “Nothing about black history or black American culture is frivolous. Everything is so serious; we all still carry the shackle of history. But when I was in the hospital, feeling the imminence of death... I wanted to know who I really was, without all the gender and racial restrictions.”

As she speaks, I think back to a photograph I’d seen pinned to the wall in her studio—two young couples in bathing suits at the beach, the women riding on the men’s shoulders, beside a beach umbrella whose gay red and white stripes echo the ones on the nearest man’s trunks. The image will be one of the big paintings in her New York debut show. It’s a happy, lighthearted scene—not a whiff of angst, but an authentic part of her story.

Originally Appeared on Vogue