Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction.

Amy Sherald

Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.

Amy Sherald

I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create.

Amy Sherald

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

Amy Sherald

When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.

Amy Sherald

I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.

Amy Sherald

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

Amy Sherald

To be human is to be visible.

Amy Sherald

I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.

Amy Sherald

Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented.

Amy Sherald

I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.

Amy Sherald

I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.

Amy Sherald

Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction.

Amy Sherald

The people I choose as models have a quality that seems to contain the past, the present, and the future all at once. It's hard to explain. I can look at 100 people in a room but only find it in one person.

Amy Sherald

I don't think anybody can create in a space where they don't feel comfortable.

Amy Sherald

When I'm painting and in the zone, it's difficult for me to stop. It can take me half a day to get into that space, and once I do, I only talk to a certain few people who won't disrupt it. Home to sleep and back at it, nothing else outside of getting food. Everything else is an annoyance getting in my way.

Amy Sherald

In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.

Amy Sherald

I paint paintings of people.

Amy Sherald

Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.

Amy Sherald

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

Amy Sherald

When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.

Amy Sherald