There are moments in the art world that feel bigger than a single exhibition, auction result, or museum acquisition. Seeing Amy Sherald on the cover of TIME is one of them.
This month, TIME launched its inaugural TIME100 Art list, recognizing the people shaping the future of art and its place in the broader culture. At the center of it—quite literally—is painter Amy Sherald.
For those who follow contemporary painting, Sherald needs little introduction but here's the short of it: "Born in Columbus, Georgia, she has spent her career expanding the possibilities of portraiture and, in particular, the ways Black Americans are represented within the long tradition of figurative painting. Her portraits are immediately recognizable: carefully composed figures, often set against fields of saturated color, with skin rendered in her signature grayscale. The paintings can feel simultaneously contemporary and timeless, intimate and monumental."
But Sherald's importance goes well beyond having developed a recognizable style.
"In 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Two years later, her career entered another realm when Michelle Obama selected Sherald to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery. Sherald and Kehinde Wiley became the first African American artists commissioned to create portraits of a president and first lady for the museum's collection."
The Michelle Obama portrait became something of a cultural phenomenon. People who might never have planned a trip around a contemporary painting suddenly wanted to stand in front of one. The response was so enormous that the National Portrait Gallery eventually moved the painting into a larger space to accommodate the crowds.
Sherald later created her extraordinary portrait of Breonna Taylor for Vanity Fair. Rather than allowing Taylor to exist in our collective memory solely through the circumstances of her death, Sherald painted her with dignity, beauty, fashion, presence and humanity. That painting is now part of the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
And now comes another milestone.
Amy Sherald is the first living painter in 50 years to appear alone on the cover of TIME.
Fifty years.
The last was Robert Rauschenberg in November of 1976. TIME itself has acknowledged that the extraordinary gap in recognizing the influence of fine art was part of the impetus for creating TIME100 Art in the first place.
We think that's both something worth celebrating and something worth thinking about.
As painters and as gallery owners, we obviously believe painting matters. We see every day the strange and wonderful ability a painting has to stop someone in their tracks, start a conversation, change the atmosphere of a room or stay in someone's mind for years. So the idea that half a century could pass without a living painter occupying a TIME cover alone feels, frankly, like a travesty.
Hopefully Amy Sherald's cover doesn't simply end that drought. Hopefully it changes the pattern.
We also have tremendous respect for what Sherald's career represents for women in the art world.
Art history is filled with extraordinary women painters, but recognition has rarely arrived evenly or easily. Museums, textbooks, galleries, auction houses and the broader culture have spent generations catching up to work that was there all along. Sherald's success doesn't erase that history, but it does help change what the future can look like.
There is something powerful about a woman painter occupying one of the most recognizable magazine covers in the world not as a celebrity who happens to paint, but simply because painting is what she does and her paintings matter.
And Sherald has consistently used that visibility to make room for other people to be seen. Her paintings place Black men and women within the visual language of monumental portraiture while also allowing her subjects to be wonderfully ordinary—standing, sitting, posing, thinking, existing. TIME recently described her work as finding beauty in everyday Americans, and Sherald herself has called what she does American storytelling.
That idea resonates deeply with us.
At Robert Lange Studios, we've always believed that representational painting can be technically extraordinary while still saying something about the time in which it was made. A beautifully painted figure can also ask questions about identity, history, family, belonging and who gets remembered.
Amy Sherald has demonstrated that on an enormous cultural stage.
So we're thrilled to see a painter on the cover of TIME. We're thrilled that the painter is Amy Sherald. And we're especially thrilled to see a woman whose career has opened doors, challenged traditions and expanded our collective idea of who belongs on museum walls being recognized this way.
Our only complaint?
Let's not wait another 50 years for the next painter.
