Here’s what painter Amy Sherald (previously) has always known about herself: She was born to be an artist. She was born to bear witness to Black life, painting, in her own words, as a “corrective” to the struggle story that’s often the only one told about Black communities. She was born to fulfill the dreams of her ancestors, particularly her mother who, according to Sherald, “was supposed to be an artist but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so.” And though she didn’t actually say this during our video interview, I’ll add that she was born to bear witness to Michelle Obama and the fullness of the former First Lady’s accomplishment in a single, stunning canvas that captured not just Obama’s vibrance but her deep-seated strength.

Though Sherald admits to being socially anxious, she is also thoughtfully chatty and open when we speak early on a Saturday morning, coffee in hand. My favorite story she shares during our interview is about turning down tickets to see the band New Edition perform when she was a girl because of school. “I wanted to stay home and study for a science test I was going to have the next day about ants. I was really into it, so I was like I don’t want to go.” I appreciate this story because it testifies to her focus, her determination, and her discipline, traits that are still very much present in adult Sherald.

I first saw her work as part of the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which she won. In the 54 x 43-inch portrait “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” a stylishly dressed young Black woman wearing a bright red hat gazes steadily at the viewer while holding an oversized teacup and saucer in her white-gloved hands. The work features several Sherald hallmarks: the grayish skin tone that confounds any ideas of colorism, a beautifully rendered background devoid of context clues, and the subject’s open, direct gaze. With the exception of the clothes, which cannot necessarily be pinpointed to a particular era or style, the portraits are almost minimalist. Sherald is not interested in putting her subjects on display. Rather she’s interested in stripping away any preconceptions (or misconceptions) about each character, allowing the viewer to have an eye-to-eye encounter with the subject. That subject invites the viewer, “Get to know me… as I actually am.”

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

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Paulette Beete: What’s your origin story as an artist?

Amy Sherald: I started drawing when I was too young to remember so I feel like it was my anointing in this life to be an artist. It’s something that I, even at a young age, really wanted to learn. I remember being frustrated when I was like six, five years old, wanting to make a masterpiece, but I didn’t have the skills. My crayons weren’t giving me Leonardo da Vinci. I think that we’re born who we are. So in a lot of ways, I’m still the same person now, still very self-critical, trying very hard to get it right. And I still don’t feel like I’m good enough all the time.

My weekends were spent playing basketball in the yard or walking through the woods behind my house or going into the homes that they were building in the neighborhood and getting scrap wood to build stuff like desks and tables for me to draw on. I’ve always liked working with my hands, and I used to want to be a construction worker. That was my dream job, that or a car mechanic or something like that.

At Clark-Atlanta University, I started as pre-med and struggled. It’s not that I’m not smart. I am, but I’m not a science person. I finally changed my major after much anxiety and feeling lost and like, what am I doing in college. I didn’t feel like I was really getting anywhere. I changed my major to art, and that pushed me immediately into my destiny. I felt like I was finally moving with the current and not fighting against it. It was kind of scary because it’s not what my parents wanted me to do, by any means. But the universe sent me my painting instructor Dr. Arturo Lindsay at Spelman College [where I’d transferred] to be my guide during that time because I didn’t have anybody to be a mentor to me in a way that I needed.

Paulette: How do you define the term portrait, and why do you think you’re drawn to portraiture as the lens through which to tell the story of Black people?

Amy: I define it as a painting of a person, but you can also create a portrait of someone with words or with anything because what makes a portrait powerful is that it leaves you with a feeling, and that feeling is what essentially creates the portrait. If the painting is doing what it’s supposed to do, you should feel the feeling that you feel in the presence of this individual.

Now, for me, I draw a line between regular portraiture and what I do because I think that I would put some portraiture in the category of passive. When I say passive, in my mind, I’m seeing a woman who’s sitting in a chair and gazing out of a window, and this is a painting of her, and I’m looking at her look out. So she’s in a passive position. She’s not aware of your presence; you’re just kind of a voyeur in the moment. The people that I paint are almost soldiers if you will. They’re present, they’re willing, they’re open, and they want to meet you as the viewer.

Portraiture, for me, is having the opportunity to tell a story, to tell my story, to tell our story [as Black people], to have the portrait work in ways that are creating a counter-narrative, a corrective narrative, but then also a narrative that can carry us into our future selves. They have the capacity to be mirrors for today and also vessels to look through to see into the future.

I’m purposefully living in a way that allows me to be in touch with my deepest self, my inner child, so that I can really understand what it is to be human without the defining constructs and struggles that we have because of race and our histories, globally speaking. I think it’s different from portraiture that we think about historically, which was for documentation of wealth or land or status. My portraits are here for self-reflection.

Portraiture, for me, is having the opportunity to tell a story, to tell my story, to tell our story.

Amy Sherald

Paulette: One of the elements I find really interesting about your work is the backgrounds. They are absolutely beautiful, but they don’t locate the figure in a particular space.

Amy: I was trying to step away from context. Context really influences how we see things, and I wanted the figures to stand as individuals within their own stories. It’s like being in an elevator with somebody. It’s just you and that person, and you’re in this box. For the time that you’re in the elevator, you wouldn’t know if maybe the person on the elevator might be going home to a mansion or to a cardboard box on the street. I want the eyes to tell the story. I want the clothes to speak.

I enjoy seeing plays that don’t have a lot of props. Sometimes it’s just one or two characters on a stage, and you have to imagine everything else. I’ve seen a couple of plays where I was fully impacted by the minimalism of everything that I saw. I saw more than what I was given to see, and I felt more. I imagined the places that they were speaking of. I enjoy that challenge of not giving (all of the context). I just want it to be solely focused on the character.

Paulette: You’ve said in past interviews that you think of painting as a resting place. Can you say more about that? And do you also think of painting as a resting place for yourself as the artist?

Amy: I do think of it as a resting place for me. I think because my paintings are quiet, they’re a respite from the rest of the world. We see so much all the time. I can’t even look at it anymore. In the news and social media, when things happen, the videos are posted, and you want to see what happened. You want to see whatever injustice. You want to see it, but I can’t watch that all the time. I can’t constantly internalize that level of deep pain and then also the aggression that you’re watching without cleansing my spirit afterward.

That’s the work my work does for me. It allows me to go back to a place of play and imagination and hope. [The people in the paintings] live in a world where possibly life is different, where children can be children, and young people don’t have to worry about police interactions or gun violence. I think in order to make it through without carrying this trauma, because I feel like trauma can be delivered secondhand, it’s important to have a resting place. And so I started using that vocabulary around the work as a way to offer something in the moment.

Paulette: I agree that because you’re having an interaction one-to-one with the figure, there is that moment of stillness, and you can get absorbed more into it. It’s really beautiful. I’d like to ask you now to speak about the role of titles in your work—how you use them and how you come up with them.

Amy: It’s my least favorite thing to do. It’s not that I don’t like doing it. It’s just that it takes me like a year to name a painting. I need to live with it. For a while, my sister was naming them, but now… I read a lot of poetry. It’s been really nice to draw these connections with the images and works of Black female writers and poets like Lucille Clifton, for example. I feel like poetry is one of those magical things that allows us to really tap into our deepest emotions and really speaks volumes to our potential as human beings. Sometimes these paintings that I make really match that imagery that these women writers words were speaking at the time. I find it really fun to pair them like I’m illustrating a Lucille Clifton poem—or Gwendolyn Brooks or Elizabeth Alexander—and how it speaks about the Black interior. That really allows me to see what I’m doing in a more fulsome way.

Paulette: You’ve spoken about your paintings as a way for Black people to be seen as a whole, where it’s not just about your race or your gender, but it is who you are at your core. And yet, you do this historic painting of Michelle Obama, and the headline is “First Black artist to paint first Black First Lady,” rather than “Incredible woman artist painting incredible woman lawyer who’s done all these amazing things.” How did you navigate that conversation?

Amy: I used to say whenever these conversations come up, there’s moments where I do need to be Black, and there’s moments where me being Black isn’t important. It depends on the day. Some days I’m an artist. Some days I’m a Black artist. Some days I’m a Black female artist. Some days I’m an American artist. Some days I’m an artist from the South. I understand the importance of the moment and needing to state that. The headlines could probably have been written more eloquently. We tend to take big moments and summarize them into a two-minute read.

Paulette: Over the past several years, the visibility of your work has grown exponentially. How do you deal with what I imagine must be the enormous pressure of being so well known?

Amy: I feel that desire to show up [to everything] because you want to show up to these things. But then you realize that if you showed up to everything that you’d probably be in your studio, like four months out of the year. I have social anxiety, always have. I went from being a deeply introverted person to someone that had a public life, and that wasn’t easy. It’s definitely easier now, five years later, because I’ve had to exercise that muscle. And there are aspects of it that are performative, I think, because that’s just how you survive. But I had to [learn to] say no because I had to protect my peace, and my peace is my practice. Where my peace is is also where my energy lives that I need to make the work. For me, that comes from profoundly and deeply quiet moments. There’s a busyness that I think destroys that for me.

Paulette: And how do you keep that pressure from affecting the work? How do you move on from painting Michelle Obama, for example, and start the next canvas?

Amy: Waking up the next morning, I’m saying, “I have to get back to work.” It was really as simple as that. I have bills to pay. I still want to have my first museum show. I still have these career goals that I’ve set for myself. I’m trying to become an important artist. You just do it, you know, and carry the holiness and the validation of that moment and let it empower you and embolden you to be even bigger and brighter. And wake up and go back to work.

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Find more of Sherald’s work on Hauser & Wirth and in Art21’s new season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.