A Wonderful Dream
AFTER TWO DECADES OF WORK, BALTIMORE ARTIST AMY SHERALD FINDS SUCCESS AND A NEW CHANCE AT LIFE.
The National Portrait Gallery is quiet on this Friday morning as a group of visitors makes its way to the third floor. In a dimly lit, sprawling gallery, past the Louis Comfort Tiffany windows and Thomas Hart Benton oils, they peruse the portraits—mostly photographs, though there are paintings and sculptures, too, all finalists in this year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Some of the works are large and take up an entire wall. Others are small and intimate. They depict all ages, body types, and ethnicities.
But one in particular stands out. She’s the woman in the navy polka dot dress. You can’t help but notice her, as she’s painted against a sky-blue background, staring out at you from the canvas with a determined look on her face. Her name is Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) and when you get up close, she surprises you. Her face has African-American features, yet at this distance, you realize she’s painted in shades of gray—hues that exist outside the colors identified with race—and the blue background she stands against is textured with flecks of purple and red. But the most eye-catching elements, regardless of your distance, are the enormous red flower perched on her head and the absurdly large white teacup and saucer she holds in her white-gloved hands.
A voice asks everyone to gather, and the members of the media who make up today’s group carry cameras and recording equipment to an open space, where the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet, and the competition exhibit’s curator, Dorothy Moss, stand at a podium alongside some of the artists. After a few words of thanks, they announce the winner of the $25,000 prize and an opportunity to create a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection: “Amy Sherald of Baltimore, Maryland”—the painter of Miss Everything. They turn to look at the woman, who smiles slightly, without showing her teeth, as if she hasn’t quite realized that she now has the attention of the whole room. She is wearing a camel-colored cape and black pants that graze her ankles. But the most eye-catching parts of her outfit are the red, Saucony tennis shoes on her feet that match her bright red fingernails, and that mirror the bold, whimsical air of her painting’s subject.
The group strolls over to Miss Everything, as Sherald cautiously takes the microphone. “My work is inspired by fantasy with a little bit of reality,” she says. She remembers seeing the movie Big Fish, a Southern gothic fantasy, and “being jealous that I hadn’t thought of the idea first.” People laugh, and Sherald pauses, before taking a more serious tone. Her work has changed since she moved to Baltimore, she says, encompassing a more social context that explores identity and the roles of gender and race. But, she thinks she’s finally found what speaks to her. “I focused on creating a body of work that was an archetype, and I think it’s going to carry me for a while.”
Afterward, she is swept up in a wave of congratulators and interviewers. When she can take a break, Sherald steps into an alcove where a video screen plays footage of the judges discussing the competition. Miss Everything was one of the portraits “that really stood out,” Helen Molesworth says in the video. Chief curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Molesworth goes on to discuss the teacup—which, in a way, makes you forget about identifying Miss Everything as a real-life character. “It’s a very realistic painting in one way, yet the details are all quite surreal,” she says. “And the figure is very self-possessed and confident. A kind of, ‘I will stand here and wait until the world catches up.’” Another juror, photographer and professor Dawoud Bey, who happens to be in attendance today and has been peering over Sherald’s shoulder at the video screen, remarks, “I agree, a very striking painting.” At hearing those words, the until now stoic, self-possessed Sherald exclaims, “Ah!” and puts her head in her hands. The reality of the day’s event is sinking in.
Amy isn’t the only Sherald holding court at the Smithsonian museum today. Her mother, Geraldine Sherald, a tiny woman with a big presence, tells Moss, Sajet, and a gaggle of National Portrait Gallery staffers who encircle her as if she was the queen mother, “Amy called and said, ‘Mom, it’s the most important day of my life, you’ve got to be here.’” The ladies all smile ebulliently, squeeze Mrs. Sherald’s arm, and then insist on taking selfies with her.
A moment later, Moss notes to a bystander how remarkable it is that Sherald has won—especially since she is the first African-American, and the first woman, to win the prize. And then, she leans in confidentially, her voice lowered, and says, “You know her story, right?”
Four months after that momentous day, Sherald sits in her combined studio/living space at Highlandtown’s Creative Alliance, gazing at the walls. At one point this year, they were covered with the vibrant blues, yellows, and pinks of her portraits, but just recently those works were shipped off to an exhibit in Chicago and all of them sold. Now, the walls are the bright white of a just-rented apartment. Such is the paradoxical life of a successful artist.
Barefoot, in a black tank top and jean shorts, Sherald ponders that piece of her identity. Since the Outwin Boochever prize, and really for the last five years, her career has been on an upswing. She’s booked a show in New York for the spring of 2017, and has a waiting list for about 20 paintings following the sold-out show entitled A Wonderful Dream at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Her work is in collections at museums like the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History & Culture. She’s been featured by The Huffington Post, the BBC, and The Washington Post, and this latest prize is an addition to a growing list of awards.
“People look at success like once you get it, it’s easy,” says Sherald, 43. “At least for me, I feel a little bit alone in it. It’s really overwhelming to go from desperation to striving for something, and then all of a sudden, it’s there. The presence of it is heavier than the absence.” She pauses and considers this for a moment. “It’s wonderful, but it’s definitely something to be reckoned with.”
That’s particularly the case because three years ago, Sherald’s life could easily have ended. Diagnosed with heart failure as an adult, she underwent a heart transplant and gained a new lease on life. But it was also the start of an at times difficult journey that is still continuing. Sherald feels the lingering effects of depression and anxiety, conditions that are known to follow heart transplants, and this has changed her personality slightly, she says.
“It’s like doing a pull-up—once you get your chin over the bar, you’ll be happy. But post-transplant, I’m kind of constantly floating just below the bar,” Sherald says. “I’m always a little subdued.”
Today, she is feeling overwhelmed by her achievements. To meet the demand for her work, she’ll have to more than double her output—she usually paints one canvas a month. “I feel like I’m on survival mode,” she says. “It’s like, wait a minute, is this what I asked for? Is this my life? Is this what I wanted when I was like, ‘God, please let me be successful?’”
She is half joking. One-on-one, Sherald is funny, youthfully joyful and sassy, without losing thoughtfulness, and she seems to find humor and levity in every situation. But you can feel that there is sincerity in what she says. She folds her long legs under her on the couch with a tinge of vulnerability. “It’s scary,” she says.
Sherald’s success has baffled her, partly because she’s never thought of herself as the best artist. “There are people out there who I was in class with who are probably better painters and drawers than me. I just work really hard,” she says, before using an explanation she often turns to in her life—magic. “Maybe it’s good karma, or maybe there are some art gods out there, I don’t know. There’s really no rhyme or reason to why it happened. It just did.”
Though she’s always been naturally drawn to art—she remembers doing small drawings at the end of sentences in her notebooks during second grade in Columbus, Georgia—it wasn’t seen as a viable option in her well-educated family. “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,’” she says. Still, she remembers first recognizing art’s transformative power when, while on a school trip to the Columbus Museum, she saw a painting by realistic portrait artist Bo Bartlett that included the image of a black man.