Breonna Taylor Portrait Artist Amy Sherald Iconizes Everyday Black Narratives

The member and artist opens a new virtual exhibition at Hauser & Wirth titled Womanist Is To Feminist As Purple Is To Lavender, continuing to critique and challenge historical Black representation.

The art of portraiture immortalises a moment, historicising the individual at a particular time and place. Earlier this year, when Amy Sherald’s glorious painting of Breonna Taylor commanded the cover of the September issue of Vanity Fair, the power and profundity of the art form was felt the world over. Awash with the aquamarine colour of her birthstone and featuring the engagement ring she would never get to wear, the painting enshrines the beauty and strength of a life tragically taken too soon. An image that would serve to inspire people to keep fighting for justice, and one that became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

It is fitting that Sherald would be chosen to honour Taylor’s life, because there is a centredness and timelessness to her works, serving as an enduring tribute, while inserting Black narratives into a past they have been erased from. Historically, portraiture is starkly white; a stately home with ominous depictions of aristocrats and the social elite on its walls. But, as Sherald told Hauser & Wirth last year, ‘Portraiture as a genre has come to have a new face. Artists of colour are using portraiture to author a narrative of people that art history was written without.’ Her resplendent image of Taylor – like all of her works – serves as a critique of accepted notions of race and representation, putting Black women in their rightful place at the heart of the American story. 

Born in 1973 in Columbus, Georgia, and now residing in Baltimore, Sherald studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, beginning a practice she now comes to define as American Realism. In 2016, she became the first woman and the first African American to win the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. This accolade would lead her to her first-ever commissioned portrait of the former First Lady, Michelle Obama – a development that would take her from relative unknown to art-world star.  

For her new online exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, titled Womanist Is To Feminist As Purple Is To Lavender, Sherald presents five small-scale portraits in gouache, revisiting the medium for the first time since her childhood. All of the works were created during the pandemic in Sherald’s home studio. As she is immunosuppressed and was in strict lockdown, she wasn’t able to street-cast her models and photograph them in her studio as she usually would. Instead, she worked from some images that she’d taken in New Orleans at the Joan Mitchell residency. Only 11 by seven inches in size, their small scale invites a closeness and intimacy, while effortlessly commanding authority.

‘I always want the work to be a resting place, one where you can let your guard down among figures you understand,’ the artist explains. An intention felt throughout the presentation, where her subjects appear calm, yet assured, in brushstrokes that are at once gentle and bold. The vivid backdrops for which she has become known are here instead seen as an absence of colour on paper, infusing the works with a natural stillness. By capturing acts of leisure, such as riding a bike and perching on an armchair, Sherald creates a meditative, safe space. From a vibrant yellow, polka-dot dress to a pink pussy-bow shirt, her subjects’ clothes – which she usually sources from vintage shops or her own collection – burst with the warmth and personality of their wearers. 

The skin tone of Sherald’s subjects is rendered in grisaille – a greyscale technique that has become her signature. ‘I didn’t want the work to be marginalised and put in a corner, because I didn’t want the discussion around it to solely be about identity,’ she has once noted on this technique. By removing gradation, her oeuvre is freed from the white gaze and combats society’s tendency to separate the Black community into ‘degrees’ of Blackness based on the shade of their skin. This, coupled with their anonymity and timelessness, allows the viewer to create their own narratives and probe their personal notions of Black American life.  

The title of the exhibition, Womanist Is To Feminist As Purple Is To Lavender, is an often-cited quote by the famous poet, activist and author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker. She first used the statement in 1983 to define her notion of ‘womanism’, which helped to centre Black women within a feminist movement of the time that largely benefitted middle-class White women. Walker defines a womanist as a feminist of colour, committed to the survival and wholeness of all people. It’s not surprising that Sherald would choose this message to define the works.  

Sherald’s practice continues to represent a procession of Black women, a sisterhood of womanists, eternally standing together to reclaim time lost. If our whitewashed history is a musty stately home, her vision for the future is a breath of fresh air – a world where everybody’s story is heard, and alive in living colour.