Amy Sherald, a painter renowned for her tender portraits of Black American life, has signed with talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CCA), marking the latest high-profile crossover between the art world and Hollywood.
Sherald rose to national fame in 2018 after being commissioned by former First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C. The work depicts Obama in grayscale, posed against a pale blue background with her chin resting on her hand, wearing a checkered Milly dress by Michelle Smith’s label that references the quilts of Gee’s Bend.
Though atypical for an official national portrait, the painting fit squarely within Sherald visual language: soft palettes and pared-down settings that foreground the emotional gravity of her subjects, most often Black Americans. (In 2016, the NPG awarded her the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, making her the first woman and first African American to receive the honor.)
Represented by Hauser & Wirth, Sherald has exhibited widely internationally, and her work is held in the collections of institutions including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Tate museum network in the UK, among others. In 2025, she was set to become the first Black contemporary artist to receive a solo exhibition at National Portrait Gallery; however, a censorship controversy culminated in her canceling the show.
Sherald said the decision was made after learning that her painting Trans Forming Liberty, of a Black transgender Statue of Liberty, might be removed from the show, in a purported attempt by Smithsonian leadership to avoid President Trump’s ire. Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has made the conservative overhaul of the arts a priority and the Smithsonian, as the steward of the nation’s visual legacy, a prime target. The painting later appeared on the cover of the New Yorker.
At CAA, Sherald joins a prestigious roster of artists represented by the agency, including Arthur Jafa and Julien Schnabel. As previously reported by ARTnews, Creative Artists Agency was founded by five power agents, among them Top 200 collector Michael Ovitz, and is part of a relatively recent trend that has seen major talent agencies—including UTA—move into artist representation.
“There is a possibility that this new model could work, but personally, I don’t believe anybody can represent an artist without a space,” Ovitz previously told ARTnews, adding that the best dealers—such as Barbara Gladstone and Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher—“ate, lived, and breathed the art business.”
