Amy Sherald

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

“Just because someone said painting is dead doesn't mean that it's a fact or the truth - painting is the soul food of art, in a way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't think anybody can create in a space where they don't feel comfortable.”

“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.”

“To be human is to be visible.”

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

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

“I'm not a very verbal person.”

“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.”

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

“I paint paintings of people.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.”

“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.”

“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.”

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