Best known for her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama and for her August, 2020, Vanity Fair cover featuring murder victim Breonna Taylor, artist Amy Sherald presents The Great American Fact, her first West Coast solo exhibition, at Hauser Wirth, March 20 through June 6. With five new portraits completed last year occupying the front gallery, the show arrives at the perfect time as the city begins to open up, galleries by appointment only and museums admitting twenty-five percent capacity.
“The great American fact is a statement that we've been here all along,” she says of the show’s title, borrowed from the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown. “We've been artists all along. We've been curators all along. We've been inventors all along. And there's a lot of people who are just being given their flowers when they've been making work for thirty years. When we think about an American girl, many different kinds of women should come into our imagination. Not just black women, Asian-American, Mexican-American, we're all a part of this pot. These images are just everyday moments, everyday American moments, everyday Americans.”
