Portrait Of The Artist

Since the reveal of her painting of Michelle Obama, Amy Sherald has become a bona fide art star. But her rise has been years in the making.

- Mattie Kahn

There’s a clatter of traffic on the street outside the Baltimore warehouse where portraitist Amy Sherald has her studio, but approach her space and music rises over the din.

It’s the last day of February, and Sherald, who until recently was little known outside certain art world circles, has just unveiled one of the most anticipated portraits in decades, an enormous canvas of Michelle Obama now on view in Washington, DC’s National Portrait Gallery. With it, Sherald has committed to the record not just her vision of one woman, but a promise: that there will be more like Obama, that the progress she represents remains possible. It’s a message that is clearly registered by a little girl who, the day after Sherald and I meet, stands awestruck in front of the painting because, as her mother explains when the image goes viral, “she believes Michelle Obama is a queen and she wants to be a queen as well.” Within a few more days, the museum has to move the portrait into a larger space, the better to accommodate the crush of visitors.

So, of course, the music Sherald has queued up is Beyoncé. Hers is a Beyoncé moment.

Ever since the Smithsonian announced it had commissioned the artists Kehinde Wiley, 41, and Sherald, 44, to paint the Obamas’ presidential portraits, Sherald’s rise has been spun into the stuff of children’s tales. It’s true that she received a heart transplant at 39, just under a decade after she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. She lost her father at 28. Her brother died in 2012. But she is not Cinderella, and her success is not good fortune. Sherald and Beyoncé have this in common: Their talent is exceptional, but neither of them pushes some fiction of effortlessness. Creation is hard.