Verbal Description: Breonna Taylor, 2020

Narrator: This work is a vertical oil on linen portrait of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old emergency room technician who was killed in March of 2020 by police officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department who forced entry into her home. Vanity Fair commissioned Amy Sherald to create this portrait of Taylor for its September 2020 issue, which was guest edited by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Taylor stands centered in the frame facing forward with one hand on her hip in front of a solid turquoise background visible from head to just below her knee. She wears a dress of a darker turquoise hue. 

As in Sherald’s other portraits, skin tone is represented in grey scale, but here there is a warmer glow in the tinted surfaces of Taylor’s skin that have the effect of pulling her into the foreground out of the flat background. Taylor’s face is at rest without a smile but with a slight wrinkle under her lower eyelids suggesting comfort, satisfaction, or affection. Highlights catch the fullness of her lips, as if she is wearing a light coat of lipstick or gloss. Her thick hair is styled in soft waves that fall just over her shoulder. A single teardrop earring set with turquoise peeks from under her hair. A delicate gold chain sits just under Taylor’s clavicle, with light glinting off the chain’s links. A simple, fine cross pendant gleams on the center of her chest framed by the v-neck of her dress that comes to a point just below a small amount of exposed cleavage. The dress slopes off of Taylor’s shoulder’s opening into wide yet simple structured sleeves. The folds of fabric bunch into a wide waistband, showing that the fabric has both lightweight and sculptural qualities that give the dress a fashionable drape around Taylor’s body. Two slits open in the dress at the front of either of her legs, appearing to be moved gently to the right by a breeze. Taylor’s right hand sits on her hip with four fingers forward and her thumb wrapping back out of view. Her other arm rests along the side of her left thigh, extended finger tips grazing an open slit. She wears an engagement ring on her ring finger. Artist Amy Sherald speaks about her decision to paint this engagement ring.

Amy Sherald: Breonna was to be engaged in a couple of weeks. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, had purchased an engagement ring that she didn't know about. And at that point I knew that I had to include that part of her life and love story in the work by including her engagement ring.