Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw helped fund the painting s acquisition.
March 8, 2021
Amy Sherald in her studio
with her portrait of Breonna Taylor (2020). Photo by Joseph Hyde courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
Vanity Fair.
Taylor was asleep in bed on March 13, 2020, when police officers forced their way into her apartment and fatally shot the 26-year-old emergency medical technician. Her death became a rallying cry in the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation last year.
Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Vanity Fair’s guest editor for a special edition on activism in September 2020, had tapped Sherald to paint Taylor for the issue’s cover. It was the artist’s second commission, after painting the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama.
March 6th, 2021 in Art and Featured. Closed
Starting March 25, Julie Mehretu’s paintings, drawings and prints will be on view in a midcareer retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, before moving to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. (PHOTO: JULIE MEHRETU)
Wall Street Journal
The abstract painter uses architectural drawings and photographs to create works on a grand scale
The artist Julie Mehretu, 51, likes to work on a grand scale. A silent short film by the British artist Tacita Dean shows Ms. Mehretu at work on her monumental painting “Mural” at the New York headquarters of Goldman Sachs in 2009, high up on a cherry picker as she grapples with a canvas 80 feet long and 23 feet high. “The scale of the Goldman Sachs painting was the reason why I decided to take that challenge on,” Ms Mehretu says. “It was scary, but exhilarating and wonderful to do.”
Typically, Amy Sherald’s gallery would handle the sale of her artwork to a collector or an institution. But when it came to
her portrait of Breonna Taylor the 26-year-old medical worker who was shot and killed
by police officers in Louisville, Ky. Sherald herself wanted to see that particular painting all the way home.
“I felt like it should live out in the world,” Sherald said. “I started to think about her hometown and how maybe this painting could be a Balm in Gilead for Louisville.”
Sherald believed
the painting should be seen by people where Taylor died as well as by a broader audience. And she intended the proceeds from her sale of the painting to advance the cause of social justice.
Send The director of Alice Walton s nonprofit Whole Health Institute says its School of Medicine in Bentonville will be the first of its kind, making a holistic approach to health care foundational to the medical school s curriculum.
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