Amy Sherald Quotes

Art class was my safe haven.

- Amy Sherald

I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.

- Amy Sherald

A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.

- Amy Sherald

Why can't I make up my own characters and paint the people I want to see in the world? I'm depicting the many people who existed in history but whose presence was never documented.

- Amy Sherald

When I'm painting and in the zone, it's difficult for me to stop. It can take me half a day to get into that space, and once I do, I only talk to a certain few people who won't disrupt it. Home to sleep and back at it, nothing else outside of getting food. Everything else is an annoyance getting in my way.

- Amy Sherald

I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.

- Amy Sherald

I've forgotten a lot of things. I've forgotten how to play the piano and how to speak Arabic, though I studied it for two years.

- Amy Sherald

My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, 'The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.'

- Amy Sherald

Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way.

- Amy Sherald

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

- Amy Sherald

When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.

- Amy Sherald

I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in museums. And I'm hopefully presenting them in a way that's universal enough that they become representative of something different than just a black body on a canvas.

- Amy Sherald

My mother was willing to support art as a summer program for me. She never supported it as a career decision until I won the National Gallery Portrait Competition.

- Amy Sherald

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

- Amy Sherald

I am relieved that I can pay back my school loans.

- Amy Sherald

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

- Amy Sherald

I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.

- Amy Sherald

Art was not a thing for my family and is still not a thing for my family. My family will not go to a museum unless I say we have to go there. That's why I really feel like it was something I was supposed to do because there was no directive that pushed me in that direction.

- Amy Sherald

Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world.

- Amy Sherald

Michelle Obama is extraordinary, but she is also the kind of woman that exists in a way that is - she's a hundred percent relatable to all kinds of people, all genders all around the world.

- Amy Sherald

When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.

- Amy Sherald

When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen.

- Amy Sherald

Becoming an artist is not empirical; it's not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn't mean you're going to make it.

- Amy Sherald

I'm not a very verbal person.

- Amy Sherald

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

- Amy Sherald

I probably shouldn't curse as much as I do.

- Amy Sherald

It's hard for me to find people to paint. There has got to be something about them that only I can see.

- Amy Sherald

I paint paintings of people.

- Amy Sherald

I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.

- Amy Sherald

To be human is to be visible.

- Amy Sherald

I wanted to be in museums. I don't do things to be small.

- Amy Sherald

In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.

- Amy Sherald

The people I choose as models have a quality that seems to contain the past, the present, and the future all at once. It's hard to explain. I can look at 100 people in a room but only find it in one person.

- Amy Sherald

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

- Amy Sherald

Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path.

- Amy Sherald

My brother dying changed me. I didn't realize how strong I was until I lost my brother.

- Amy Sherald