Amy Sherald

“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. H...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

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

“Art class was my safe haven.”

“I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize w...”

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

“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.”

“When people ask me about color in my work, I tend to say that it came from spending a lot of time in Panama.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”