Amy Sherald talks to Dr. Leslie King-Hammond about ambition, bending the rules and how that Michelle Obama portrait got made

Juliana Ukiomogbe

Long before Dr. Leslie King-Hammond became a leading scholar and mentor in the art world, she was a young girl watching a glass blower make her a replacement eye.

Born in the South Bronx in 1944, she had developed a tumor that required one eye to be removed. In a new documentary about her career, A Life in Art: Through the Eye of Dr. Leslie King Hammond, she recalls watching an ocularist transform a “lump of glass” into a new eye using thin tubes of colored glass and a blowtorch.

“I was absolutely freaking mesmerized,” Dr. Hammond said. “I never saw anything like that in my life…From that point on, I think I became, basically, a pain in the ass to my mother because I kept asking questions about what the nature of creativity was and who turns out to be an artist.”

That curiosity, at the heart of the now-82-year-old’s work, is the subject of the film, which was co-directed by her son, Rassann Hammond, and Ben Baker-Lee and recently premiered at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. Archival and contemporary footage illustrates Dr. Hammond’s journey from a young girl captivated by glassblowing to an influential art historian, curator, lecturer, and advocate. She earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D in art history from Johns Hopkins University and served as dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she had an enormous impact.

Audiences see the self-proclaimed “shadow warrior” at work as she visits the art studios of her former students and current mentees, including Loring Cornish, Ernest Shaw, Jeffrey Kent, and Amy Sherald. Among her other roles, Dr. Hammond has been an advocate for artists of color, including Sherald, her graduate student at MICA, whom she mentored as Sherald painted her historic portrait of Michelle Obama.

What follows is a conversation between Amy Sherald and Dr. Hammond about their long-lasting friendship, and the importance of mentorship in an ever-evolving creative landscape.

Amy Sherald: I don’t know when we first really connected. You were not in my life, and then you were. But when I met you, you were what I needed. I needed someone older and wiser than me, who also looked like me, who gave me permission to be myself in an environment I felt uncomfortable in.

When I say uncomfortable, I think my first two weeks [at Maryland Institute College of Art], I was saying to myself, “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to be here. Everybody in this graduate program knows so much more than I know.” You helped me get my wits about me, and really became a grounding force.

Dr. Leslie King Hammond: First, let me explain my presence in the art world and academia at that time. I was an anomaly. I mean, how many Black people were in charge? I think of Murry DePillars, who was at Virginia Commonwealth University. Grace Hampton was at Penn State. And that was it for the entire United States.

You came to me because your professor, Arturo Lindsay, a colleague of mine from Spelman, called me up and said, “I have a student that I want you to take into MICA,” because he knew that I had a history of protecting, encouraging, and empowering the vision of Black artists who were looking for their degree. So here you come, and you were just adorable.

Sherald: I was very green. But you understood that talent needed more than instruction; it needed protection. I think I was the only Black student in my cohort.

Hammond: Yes, you were.

Sherald: You understood that being a Black artist was not something your work needed to explain or defend. It was a position that you could work from with freedom and authority. That was really important for me at that time.

When I think about my first days in grad school, I describe it as feeling like I was a little Black girl from the South. I came from a very insular, sheltered background, having lived in Georgia my whole life and then moving to a city I didn’t know. Arturo had explained to me what graduate school was, but I was 20-something, so I was like, “Yeah, grad school, whatever.”

And then I get there, and I’m like, “Oh crap, this is serious business.” I think I would have had a very different experience had you not been a part of my journey there for those two years.

Hammond: The graduate programs that I administered at MICA were really about mentoring. I didn’t want to tell the artists what to do. I wanted them to, hopefully, find their voice, vision, and personal essence. And you were there trying to paddle through it.

Sherald: It’s not like I was making good work, right? It wasn’t good.

Hammond: Look, that’s not the point. The point was that you were there and allowed to figure it out, to fail, to experiment, to try different things, to watch other people fall on their faces and get up. As long as you produced two or three paintings that showed you were finding a way into your future, we signed you off and launched you into the world. All that work led you to the work that you were ultimately going to do.

Sherald: I remember when I got the Michelle Obama commission. Somehow you ended up contacting me, saying, “I have a studio space at the Motor House in Baltimore [where Dr. Hammond served as gallery director and studio manager], and you should take it.” And at that time I needed it. So you ended up helping me find a studio where I was able to work for two years. It was the nicest space I ever had up until that point.

Hammond: Nicest and healthiest. We didn’t have any leaks.

Sherald: No leaks. And I’m a rule follower, right? So I got this commission, and they’re telling me, “You can’t take any pictures of the work. You have to be very careful that it doesn’t get leaked. You can’t tell anybody.”

So I’m just making this portrait in private, and then, of course, I tell you that I got the commission, and you’re like, “You need to have pictures taken. Amy, nobody’s going to care 10 years from now. You need to take some pictures.”

In my little Virgo mind, I’m like, “Can’t take any pictures. Nope, not going to do it. Not going to break a rule.” I feel so grateful for that because when it was all over, they’re like, “Do you have any pictures of you painting the portrait?” And I wouldn’t have had any.

Hammond: As an art historian, one of the things that we have had to deal with is that much of what African American artists have done in this nation has fallen between the cracks. So when you told me that you had the Michelle Obama commission, my first initiative was to make sure that I put up an invisible protective screen.

I told everybody in the building, “She’s got some serious work to do, so leave her be.” And when I saw what you were doing, I went, “Oh my God, she has rewritten the whole history of portraiture in the United States.”

So I really didn’t care that they said you couldn’t have any pictures. I told my son, “Please come in here. I want you to do some B-roll and document it.” And you see that in the film. I knew this was historic and iconic. And by that point, you had matured to such a level of elegance and grace. You were fluid and smooth in talking about the intention behind what you were doing. So, to say that I’m proud of you? Oh, please. The best of the best.

Sherald: My ability to speak publicly is something that I really had to grow into. When I gave my thesis talk at MICA at 30 years old, I could not speak in front of people without crying. But once I saw that my life was becoming what it was and that my trajectory was going to be what it was, I was like, “I have to figure this out because I can’t be 34 years old crying while I’m talking to students at Spelman or wherever.”

It was definitely a learning curve for me. The deeper I got into my practice and the more I understood myself, the greater the language I had to describe what I was trying to make. Also, I was just captivated by your documentary. I loved the earlier footage. I don’t think I knew your whole story.

Hammond: I thought I had fooled myself into thinking I was a shadow warrior who would champion and support other artists, which I have. So the last thing I wanted was that kind of attention.

However, the universe plays tricks on you. Long before I met you, my son Rassaan had been recording my stuff, and he said, “I’ve been following you forever, Mom. I have all of this archival material. What are we going to do with it?” So his buddy Ben said, “Wait a minute, we need to do a story on your mom.” So I had nothing to do with the film except be in it. This was their interpretation of what they saw I was doing in the world of art.

Sherald: I always said that I had the kind of mother that I needed. My mom was the one person in my life that I needed to prove wrong, who didn’t really understand what my dreams and my goals were. And it’s not like I did either. I never thought I would make it as far as I have. In 2014, success for me was making $200,000 a year selling my paintings, and they would sell for $15,000 or $20,000, and I thought that was it.

But I have art parents. Between you and Arturo, I got the kind of nurturing that I needed. Despite the motivation that it gave me to prove my mother wrong, you still need people in your life who can offer you support when you need it. It’s not easy, and you’re pursuing something that’s not empirical, and sometimes you wanna give up, but there are people around you who won’t let you give up.

Sometimes your friends are gonna be like, “Yeah, girl, you’re 35 and still a waitress. You’re living this dream that’s probably never gonna happen.” But at that time, I was working on things you could look at, and you understood the value in what I was making and made sure that I didn’t forget that in those hard moments.

Hammond: I just believed in you. I believed in what you were doing. That’s what, I think, has been a sustaining thing. It’s this mutual respect that we have for each other in the roles that we play in each other’s lives.

I try to keep a distance. I don’t want to mess with you too much. But you’re not even really mid-career yet. That’s what’s so exciting. I wanted you to be strong. I didn’t want you to lose your vision. So I’m the shadow warrior. But now with this film out here, my cover is blown.

Sherald: You know that saying that when somebody dies, a library is burned? You are a library. You’re so much to so many people, and you hold so much wisdom. You’ve opened so many doors for people and taught us how to keep those doors open for artists who are coming after us. You’re just a gem of a human being.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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