Artist Amy Sherald, whose work documents the African American experience through intimate portraits, has signed with CAA for representation.
In 2018, New York City-based Sherald was selected by former First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
That painting — which had Obama resting her chin lightly on her hand in a relaxed, yet determined pose — overnight thrust Sherald into the public spotlight after for years being mostly a star in a cloistered art world.
Her paintings are also part of public gallery collections worldwide, as her work hangs in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Gallery in the UK.
Her paintings have also enabled Sherald to become the first woman and first African American to receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
And she received the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman Award and the 2018 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. More recently, Sherald last year was awarded the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies.
Born in Columbus, Georgia, Sherald received her MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University.
Read the full article here
