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IN 2012 , WHEN AMY SHERALD was
39, she collapsed in a Baltimore Rite
Aid. The artist had been diagnosed
eight years earlier with idiopathic car-
diomyopathy—a disease of the heart
muscle that makes it difficult for the
organ to pump blood—and had been
told that she would need a heart trans-
plant. At the time, it hadn’t seemed
urgent. She was in great physical shape,
training to compete in a triathlon, and
she was about to get her M.F.A. from
the Maryland Institute College of
Art. Now, suddenly, she was in the
hospital at Johns Hopkins, waiting
for the transplant. By a cruel irony,
her beloved younger brother, Michael,
was dying from non–smoking related
lung cancer in Georgia. “I knew at that
point I had to live,” Sherald tells me,
“because my mom couldn’t lose two
children within weeks.” Eleven days
after Michael died, Sherald got a new
heart and a new life.
Sherald, of course, is the artist be-
hind the now famous official portrait
of Michelle Obama that hangs in the
Smithsonian. But when she was chosen
for the commission, in 2016, she was
still largely unknown. Kehinde Wiley,
the artist selected to paint President
Obama’s portrait, was an art-world
star. His bold, heroic portraits of black
subjects in poses that channel the Old
Masters were on the must-have lists
of savvy collectors. Sherald, on the
other hand, was a 43-year-old African
American artist who lived and worked
in Baltimore. She painted vivid, head-
on portraits of people she met on the
street (and photographed)—“an
American realist, painting American
people doing American things,” she
tells me. Her name had surfaced in
A my Sherald
The portraitist to Michelle
Obama is preparing
for her New York debut.
By Dodie K azanjian.
SHINE A LIGHT
Sherald, in an Oscar de la Renta caftan, in her
studio, with the photographer’s assistant,
Justin Johnson. Hair, Edris Nichols; makeup,
Kiki Gifford. Details, see In This Issue.
Photographed by Carrie Mae Weems.
Sittings Editor: Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.
