Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald became a household name in 2018 when her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery — a stunning, larger-than-life painting that depicted Obama in a geometric Milly dress against a sky-blue background, her skin rendered in Sherald's signature grisaille gray. The portrait drew record crowds and fundamentally changed who Americans expect to see on museum walls.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973, Sherald studied painting at Clark Atlanta University and earned her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Her path was not easy — she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and received a heart transplant in 2012, an experience that deepened her artistic vision. She paints Black subjects in moments of leisure, rest, and everyday beauty, deliberately countering the art historical tradition of depicting Black people primarily through the lens of labor, struggle, or spectacle.

Sherald's use of gray-toned skin is a conscious choice to remove race as a distraction, allowing viewers to engage with her subjects as individuals first. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, and her portrait of Breonna Taylor for the cover of Vanity Fair became one of the most important images of the racial justice movement in 2020.