Amy Sherald in “Everyday Icons” - Season 11 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

♪ 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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