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.
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
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.
I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.
Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.
To be human is to be visible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think anybody can create in a space where they don't feel comfortable.
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.
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.
I paint paintings of people.
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.
My approach to portraiture is conceptual.
When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.
Michelle Obama is extraordinary, but she is also the kind of woman that exists in a way that is - she's a hundred percent relatable to all kinds of people, all genders all around the world.
When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen.
Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path.
I wanted to be in museums. I don't do things to be small.
It's hard for me to find people to paint. There has got to be something about them that only I can see.
I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.
Becoming an artist is not empirical; it's not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn't mean you're going to make it.
I thought I was going to die when I was 39.
The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.
Art class was my safe haven.
My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, 'The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.'
I've forgotten a lot of things. I've forgotten how to play the piano and how to speak Arabic, though I studied it for two years.
My mother was willing to support art as a summer program for me. She never supported it as a career decision until I won the National Gallery Portrait Competition.
Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way.
I'm not a very verbal person.
I probably shouldn't curse as much as I do.
I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.
I am relieved that I can pay back my school loans.
My brother dying changed me. I didn't realize how strong I was until I lost my brother.
A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.
