Amy Sherald on the gaze and humanity of her portraits

She has painted portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor. But much of Amy Sherald's work is about filling in absent images of everyday Americans. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks with the artist and takes us to the first major exhibition covering her career for our arts and culture series, Canvas. They look at us and we at them. A young woman in a pink blouse with a bow. A young man in stars and stripes and cowboy hat. Paintings hung a little lower than usual, says artist Amy Sherald, directly at eye level. My figures are present. They're not passively painted. These aren't passive portraits. They are standing there, ready to be gazed upon, but also to gaze back at you. And in that interaction, I think we should find our humanity in each other. The first major survey of Sherald's work is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some show scenes at the beach or the playground. Most are individuals in brightly colored clothing set against equally vivid backgrounds. Sherald titled the exhibition American Sublime. This word sublime. Yes, excellence. Yes, the excellence of what it is to be an everyday American. The people that make the world go round. All of these individuals that are in my portraits stand up as archetypes for that because we can think about all of the big names and the big H of history, but the little h is what really makes everything, everything. We met Sherald recently at her studio in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the river from New York. Here she mixes her paints to concoct her own signature varieties of color. So this is my happy place back here. All kept in a storage space ready for use. This is also one of my favorite colors here. What is it? It's called Eat Your Veggies, and it's a mint green. Oh, so you not only make them, but you, of course, get to name them. Yes. I see. That's the fun part. And here is where she's created the works that have brought much renown. Most prominently, her portrait of Michelle Obama, captured in a moment of quiet contemplation rather than official pose. The first black first lady painted by the first black woman to receive such a commission. And of Breonna Taylor, the medical worker shot and killed by Louisville police in 2020 in a botched raid on her apartment. What I wanted to bring out in that portrait was that she was an everyday American girl. She was just living her life in the pursuit of the American dream like everybody else. In fact, most of Cheryl's work is of everyday people. And though they can be called portraits, they're not intended as portraits of the specific individual she's painting. Rather, they're characters she's imagining into existence. Black Americans rarely the subjects of portrait painting. You referred to them as archetypes. I mean, these are real people, but you're not painting them as themselves. No, because of that absence, like they have to represent so much more than themselves. They have to. I think they do. Yeah, I think they have to. The girl next door, the farmer, for example, they're standing in history to represent the stories of those that came before them and the stories of those that will come after them. You refer to yourself as an American realist. Yeah. For me, I was doing what American realists were doing, what Andy Wyeth does, what Edward Hopper was doing. I'm painting everyday American moments. And within that, there is the Black American identity. Which is not there for the most part. The work does sit within art history as a corrective narrative, but it also sits in history as a celebration. Like a film director, Cheryl casts people. Some she meets in life, some from casting agencies. And dresses them in clothes she collects. This is my costume section. These are items that I've either used in paintings or I potentially will use. She found this dress on eBay. I like the flowers, I like the color, I like the story that it could possibly tell. The story it could tell. Yeah. The clothes tell a story in the painting as well as the person. In several paintings, Cheryl also made her own versions of iconic photographs, including Alfred Eisenstadt's VJ Day Kiss in Times Square from 1945. Now two Black men in a work titled For Love and for the Country. Everywhere, including backgrounds, rich colors. Note especially the skin tones, which she starts from shades of gray. When I'm mixing the color of the complexion, it varies between like a darker gray to a lighter gray, if it's like a lighter skinned person like myself. I use warm colors like Old Holland Yellow Light and I mix that with the black so that it gives the skin warmth and I think that's why the skin kind of like glows and resonates as being alive. The result of all her aesthetic choices, recognizably Black people. But in a subtle, though for her crucial way, portraits that are not about race first. Maybe we don't have to start there. Let's start with my humanity first. There's one of a girl with a red wig. She's kind of like a grunge girl. Like that was me when I was 22. I saw her, but she inspired me to paint her because she was living in her full authentic self. And I think that's what's really important. And so that's the universalism of it. It's like people should be able to look at someone that may not look like them, but also feel their humanity at the same time. Amy Sherald's exhibition American Sublime is at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art through March 9th before moving to New York's Whitney Museum and later the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown in Jersey City, New Jersey.