Outside Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on a sunny morning in May, Angelica Arbelaez, assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, said the new exhibition “will be a wonderful opportunity for visitors to get an understanding of Amy’s practice and development as an artist.”
“You get a sense of how she was thinking when she was in graduate school from the mid-2000s, and you get to trace her kind of artistic evolution all the way through 2024,” Arbelaez said of the 39 portraits in this mid-career retrospective, presented as a touring show through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “So there will be much to see, particularly works that convey the way that she works with her sitters, the quiet depth and elegance with which she captures them, and also how Amy has just become more and more ambitious with the scale of her works, as well.”
Amy Sherald was born in West Georgia in 1973 and told PBS in 2023 about her first experience seeing a Black person depicted in a painting on a museum wall. It was Bo Bartlett’s “Object Permanence.”
“As a sixth-grader, my first time going to a museum, when I saw this painting by Bo Bartlett, I was shocked that I was looking at a figure of a Black man,” she recalled. “He was standing in front of a house. He had on a belt that had like some handyman stuff. I just remember standing there for a few minutes and like, I realized when I saw that work that I wanted to make paintings like that. I was able to see my future in that moment.”…