Amy Sherald brought one of her most beloved paintings to life for tonight’s Met Gala, which was held to benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
With the help of designer Thom Browne, Sherald dressed up as the little girl in her 2014 painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), the work that won the artist the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Prize and appeared on a New Yorker cover last year.
The painting, which is featured in a traveling Sherald survey that opens at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on May 15, features a young woman holding an oversized teacup and staring at the viewer. Sherald drew her inspiration for the work from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Sherald, a member of the committee behind the Met Gala alongside artists such as Anna Weyant and Tschabalala Self, told Vanity Fair of the process behind her outfit: “We’ll be trying on the dress, and then also we had three different fascinators made to try to figure out which one I’m going to wear with the dress, so she has on a red fascinator like the painting. And then what else, Thom?”
Browne was personally contacted by Sherald about the project, which he said took more effort than he’d initially expected. “It was a little later than I think we both would’ve wanted, but I would jump through hoops to do it for Amy, because I just love what she does and I love everything that she represents,” he told Vanity Fair. “And it’s so humbling that when she says, if I was a painter, I would paint like her. There’s very, very, very few people that could possibly paint like Amy Sherald.”
Sherald’s outfit was designed to fulfill the Met Gala’s theme of “Fashion Is Art.” As usual, the gala’s theme corresponds to that of the Costume Institute’s accompanying show, which is this year called “Costume Art.”
