Amy Sherald valuation
Paints Black Americans in grey skin tones against flat colour, and painted Michelle Obama's official portrait.
Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973.
What a work by Amy Sherald is worth
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Bio
Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973. She began on a pre-medical course at Clark Atlanta University before turning to painting, studied with the artist Arturo Lindsay at Spelman College, and took her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she worked with Grace Hartigan. Her portraits show Black Americans in everyday settings, posed from her own staged photographs and painted with grisaille skin tones against flat fields of colour, a choice she has described as a way of questioning ideas about race and colour. In 2016 she became the first woman and the first African American to win the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, and the following year Michelle Obama chose her to paint her official portrait, unveiled in 2018.
Sherald works slowly and her paintings are few, so most are in museums or long-held collections. Her paintings have come up at auction since 2020, and for any that do, provenance through her galleries and exhibition history are the first questions.
Columbus, Baltimore and the National Portrait Gallery
Her portrait of Michelle Obama and Kehinde Wiley's of Barack Obama were the first presidential portraits commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery from African American artists.
American Sublime, her first major survey, opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2025 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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