CULTURAL CENTER OF CAPE COD

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

AMY SHERALD, ARTIST

Amy Sherald is an American painter known for a style referred to as “simplified realism” documenting the contemporary African-American experience in the United States, typically through large-scale portraits and often working from photographs of strangers.

Sherald was born in 1973 in Columbus, Georgia and loved drawing and sketching as a child. At school, she would draw pictures at the end of her sentences to help illustrate her words; houses, flowers, trees, birds, and other characters all appeared. Her love of art was strengthened during a trip to the Columbus Museum. She remembers seeing a painting—Object Permanence by American realist Bo Bartlett—and was surprised to see her own world reflected and replicated out of context.

“What was so shocking…was to find out that art wasn’t something in a book…that people did [art] a long time ago, that it was real life. And then, when I saw an image of a person of color, it all came together in that moment—that this was something real, that somebody created this who was alive at the same time that I was alive.”

Inspired and motivated, Sherald decided to pursue an artistic career, despite parental objections. “The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist,” she said. Her mother’s opposition, pressuring her to go into medicine instead, only cemented her determination to become an artist and made her more determined to succeed on her own terms. “She was a black woman born in 1930s Alabama where everything was really about surviving,” she said. “What I needed was somebody to prove wrong. I’m a strong woman because I was raised by one, and I’m a better person for that.”

Her technique distills an artistic philosophy to represent the skin tones of her black subjects in grayscale rather than flesh tones. Her aim is to challenge an idea of race where specific skin color automatically assigns a category, influenced and provoked (it would seem) by her common preference of using black and white photographs as source material. It is her way of challenging the marginalization of her work and creating language and narrative around her identity; “bringing a kind of poetry to black figuration.”

Sherald realized that she was unconsciously recreating a similar calm and dignity that she saw in the inspirational photographs, that black families were having taken of and posed by one another. This style—and this grayscaling technique—inevitably invites us, the viewer, to contemplate the inner lives of her subjects. “I just recognized my work inside of these photographs and started to go further,” she says.

HAPPENINGS

Tuesday, November 14, 1–3:30pm