Amy Sherald Quotes
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To be human is to be visible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.
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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.
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I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
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I paint paintings of people.
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When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.
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I don't think anybody can create in a space where they don't feel comfortable.
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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.
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A lot of the artists that people equate my work to, I didn't find out about until after graduate school.
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Signing autographs is weird. I'm an introvert, so it's been a strain in that way.
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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.'
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Success, for me, is staying true to who you are and not deviating off a path.
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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.
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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.
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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.