Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw helped fund the painting s acquisition.
March 8, 2021
Amy Sherald in her studio
with her portrait of Breonna Taylor (2020). Photo by Joseph Hyde courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
Vanity Fair.
Taylor was asleep in bed on March 13, 2020, when police officers forced their way into her apartment and fatally shot the 26-year-old emergency medical technician. Her death became a rallying cry in the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the nation last year.
Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Vanity Fair’s guest editor for a special edition on activism in September 2020, had tapped Sherald to paint Taylor for the issue’s cover. It was the artist’s second commission, after painting the official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama.