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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I thought I was going to die when I was 39.”

“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.”

“My approach to portraiture is conceptual.”

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

“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.'”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Art class was my safe haven.”

“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.”

“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.”