In Conversation: Amy Sherald & Calida Rawles
About this Event
The first Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Distinguished Lecture Series event of the academic year, join Atlanta University Center alumni artists Amy Sherald (Clark Atlanta University '97) and Calida Rawles (Spelman College '98) in conversation about their concurrent exhibitions on view in Atlanta and their exciting career pathways. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Cheryl Finley, Walton Endowed Professor + Director, AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective.
- DOORS OPEN AT 5:45PM
- THE LECTURE BEGINS AT 6PM
- THE BOOK SIGNING BEGINS AT 7PM
ABOUT AMY SHERALD (b.1973, Columbus, GA)
Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. Sherald engages with the history of photography and portraiture, inviting viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black life in American art.
Sherald received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University. Sherald was the first woman and first African-American to ever receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., she also received the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman award and the 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. In 2018, Sherald was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. Sherald’s work is held in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC.
ABOUT CALIDA RAWLES (b.1976, Wilmington, DE)
The paintings of Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, DE; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating her subjects in dynamic spaces, her recent work employs water as a vital, organic, multifaceted material, and historically charged space. Ranging from buoyant and ebullient to submerged and mysterious, Black bodies float in exquisitely rendered submarine landscapes of bubbles, ripples, refracted light and expanses of blue. For Rawles, water signifies both physical and spiritual healing as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. She uses this complicated duality as a means to envision a new space for Black healing, and to reimagine her subjects beyond racialized tropes. Enhancing the seductive nature of water, the work tempers heavier subjects with aquatic serenity and geographic and temporal ambiguities, inviting multiple readings. Embedded in her titles and topographical notations in the compositions, Rawles’ canvases represent an expansive vision of strength and tranquility during today’s turbulent times, while insisting on the triumph of humanity.
Rawles received a B.A. from Spelman College, Atlanta, GA (1998) and an M.A. from New York University, New York, NY (2000). Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN (2025); Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, FL (2024); The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE (2024); Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2023; 2021); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA (2020); and Standard Vision, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA (2024); Ordinary People - Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA (2024); L.A. Story, Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, CA (2024); Story Generation*. Jugend trotz(t) Krise, Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, Germany (2023); Rose in the Concrete, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2023); 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2022); Black American Portraits, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2021), Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2023); A Shared Body, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL (2021); View From Here, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Art Finds a Way, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2020); Visions in Light, Windows on the Wallis, Beverly Hills, CA (2020); Presence, Fullerton College Art Gallery, Fullerton, CA (2019); With Liberty and Justice for Some, Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Sanctuary City: With Liberty and Justice for Some, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA (2017); and LACMA Inglewood + Film Lab, Inglewood, CA (2014)
Rawles created the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, “The Water Dancer,” and her work is in numerous public and private collections, including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Rawles’ first large-scale public art installation, The Way of Time (2022), is now on display at the Sofi Stadium promenade in Inglewood, CA.
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Photo credit: Kelvin Bulluck (Amy Sherald)
Video credit: New York Academy of Art
Photo credit: Calida Rawles Studio
Video credit: Film by Jeremy Eichenbaum (Calida Rawles)
https://vimeo.com/878747227?fl=pl&fe=sh
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