♪ soft uplifting music ♪
♪ ethereal ambient music ♪
[Amy Sherald] I really have this deep belief that images can change the world
it's not that I started making work with that belief but it's what I've come to
know
♪♪♪
It's a beautiful way to tell a story
♪♪♪
I consider myself an American realist
For me it means just recognizing my Americanness first,
and just wanting the work to join a greater ongoing conversation.
Edward Hopper or Andy Wyeth they're telling these American stories
and I'm also telling American stories
♪♪♪
[Man Announcer] Miss Amy Sherald, portrait artist.
[Woman Announcer] Last week, Amy Sherald went from being a virtual unknown
to one of the most talked about artists in the world
On Monday, her painting of Michelle Obama
was unveiled alongside Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Barack Obama
Both Sherald and Wiley were interviewed and chosen for the job
by the Obamas themselves...
[Amy] I wanted to paint a quiet and Powerful portrait of her that
offered the viewer a different kind of moment.
♪ sensitive piano music ♪
And make it truly about her and not about
the "First Lady" title.
And making everyone feel the way that she makes people feel in person,
which is like she's very relatable.
When they look at Michelle, they can see themselves.
By being herself, she gives us permission to be our full selves.
♪♪♪
It just so happens that painting Black people
is kind of political.
But these figures hanging on museum walls,
it's more than just that;
you know, it's more than just the corrective narrative.
It's gotta be about humanity first, and then everything else has to follow.
♪♪♪
The decision to paint the skin in gray, when I first started making this work
I think I had an anxiety about the work being marginalized
and the conversation solely being about identity.
This was something that I wasn't trying to escape necessarily,
but I wanted the work to be bigger than that.
I started to think of it as a way to allow the viewer to have
an experience that was not about race first.
These paintings, for me, are really about our interior lives.
[birds chirping] [sprinkler ticking]
[Geraldine] Well, this is Amy. It's not a large one, but that's Amy,
and I'm trying to think of her age at the time.
[Amy] Six or seven, maybe second grade.
And then this is all of my siblings.
[Geraldine] Yeah, Amy was the bossy one.
[laughter]
[Amy] That's funny.
[Geraldine] She wanted to be an artist and, of course,
I would always say, "I don't want a starving artist.
You can be a doctor, a lawyer, anything better than an artist.
Do your art on the side."
But she was determined to be an artist.
[Amy] Yeah, and this is my mom when she was 19.
[Geraldine] High school.
♪ sensitive piano music ♪
Having these here for me was the opportunity to understand my
history and where I come from.
And after using the gray scale painting,
I really started to think about these images that I had growing up.
♪♪♪
I was always drawn to the photograph of my grandmother, Jewel
I just think photographs from this time,
that eyes really tell a story like you can really feel who they were in that
moment, and I think that's what really draws me to black and white photography
is because it's so special and saturated with so much emotional energy.
Looking at her picture, I saw a woman who was dignified, who represented herself
in a way that influenced how I wanted to be represented in the world as well.
I don't think I realized that I was missing seeing imagery of myself in art history.
It wasn't until I came across a painting that actually had a person of
color in it — a Black person — that I realized that
I had never seen that before.
♪♪♪
As a sixth grader, my first time going to a museum,
when I saw this painting by Bo Bartlett,
I was shocked that I was looking at a figure of a Black man.
He was standing in front of a house,
he had on a belt that had, like, some handyman stuff.
I just remember standing there for a few minutes,
and I realized when I saw that work that I wanted to make paintings like that.
I was able to see my future in that moment.
So this is my childhood bedroom, and it's pretty much exactly as I left it
when I moved to Atlanta to go to Clark Atlanta University.
I didn't have the kind of mom that, like,
let us put posters up in our room or anything like that;
like, everything had to be just like this when I left to go to school.
♪ smooth jazzy music ♪
I waited tables from the time I was 25 until I was about 37.
♪♪♪
I kept painting.
I was trying to figure out where I fit in and what my voice would be,
and in my mind I was like, "Well, I don't see just paintings of Black people just being Black."
Like, we're just here, we're living our lives,
hanging out, just being ourselves.
♪♪♪
Post grad school, I run into this model who was, like,
a six-one, young Black woman,
and I asked her if she would come and allow me to take a picture of her.
She had on a pink shirt that had white polka dots on it and a big bow tie.
She's standing there with her arms dropped down to her side,
her gaze meeting the viewer, and she looks a little bit
uncomfortable, a little bit awkward.
She, in that moment, stood there as, like,
everything that I wanted to represent.
She was fully herself in this out-of-the-box kind of way.
That painting was a seminal piece for me because it really
solidified in my mind, like, what exactly I was doing.
I wanted to make images that told stories like this.
I started finding the models that I wanted to find,
creating these different narratives and scenarios that
wanted to see exist in the world.
♪♪♪
[Amy] Hi, guys!
— Hi!
— How are you?
Very nice to meet you.
[Amy] Nice to meet you. — Nice to meet you too.
[Amy] Oh...
[Amy] Hi. — Hi, very nice to meet you.
[Amy] Nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this.
[Amy] You're a medium?
— Yep, yes.
[Amy] All right, let's head down.
I just gotta get a visual of what this is gonna look like.
I kinda...
My process is that I find the painting, like...
You know, we're gonna do a lot of different poses.
— Cool.
[Amy] Let's give it a shot and see how it goes.
— Like this?
And then just like that.
[Amy] Yup.
And then move this foot up just a couple of inches.
— I did. [Amy] Oh, there we go.
[beep]
Okay, Raj, look at him in his eyes.
[beep] [camera snap]
♪ curious ambient music ♪
Photography is the beginning of the painting.
It's how I begin to search for what I want in the work.
I let the models feel their way through what's happening,
and then each pose, I try to
adjust to find exactly what I'm looking for,
what the painting is going to be like.
What is it going to feel like?
Are the colors right? Are positions right?
— All right, we're shooting.
I rely on the organic in my work; like, I try not to over-plan,
I just go in with my antennas up, looking for the right moments
and waiting for that synergy to build between the models.
And I leave the photo session with exactly the image that I'm going to work
with, so it's almost like it's my sketchbook.
— That's amazing.
That's good.
[laughter]
— This is perfect 'cause the way your noses are, everything is great.
♪♪♪
[Amy] I have been looking at a lot of photographs of iconic American moments
and reconsidering them and reimagining them.
And so I came across the image from the V Day kiss,
and then I thought, "It would be wonderful if I could recreate
this image but with two men."
When I think about who's going to be represented in my work,
I think it speaks to the moment.
[Woman Newscaster] This morning, the family of a Kentucky woman shot
and killed by police is demanding answers,
filing a wrongful death lawsuit against three officers,
Breonna Taylor's family claiming officers blindly fired more than
20 shots into her apartment two months ago.
On March 13th, three officers entered...
[Amy] Breonna Taylor was an all-American girl from an
all-American family.
Her mom told me that she was a girly girl
and she liked to get dressed up.
And it was really heartbreaking for me to realize that it was
also a love story,
that her boyfriend at the time was going to propose to her,
like, within weeks of that happening,
so then I wanted to include the engagement ring.
And all of these things clued me in to how I felt like she would
possibly want to be represented on the cover of a magazine.
♪ emotional music ♪
I painted it for her family so that when they look at this image,
they see the whole story.
I think that we deserved a whole picture of her life.
After the cover came out, the work was co-acquired by her
hometown museum, which is The Speed,
but then also the Smithsonian African-American Museum of History and Culture.
I thought that it was important for it to be in line-of-sight of the
government in Washington DC.
I just started having the space to make paintings this large.
It's a dream come true; it's the dream that I had when I was in high school
when I realized that artists had big studios and made huge paintings.
Sometimes, it feels surreal to walk in here and just see the work
that I've made and see the work that I'm making.
For most of my life, it was something that I was striving for.
♪ uplifting ethereal music ♪
When I look back at my life, it seems fairly orchestrated,
these kind of moments that push you forward.
I just feel lucky that I listened to my heart and
listened to whatever my intuition said;
I was like, "I'm gonna do that."
I was told by somebody in my life,
"Don't listen to criticism and don't listen to praise.
Just do what you do."
♪♪♪
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