CANCELED — Amy Sherald and W. Kamau Bell in Conversation

Join us for a conversation between artist Amy Sherald and stand-up comedian, director, and producer W. Kamau Bell. Currently on view at SFMOMA, Amy Sherald: American Sublime conveys the quiet power in everyday people and invites viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of American identity. In his work, Bell uses humor as a lens to explore conflict, race, and culture — while also pointing to the connective tissue that could bring people together across divergence. In this conversation, Sherald and Bell will explore the resonances across their work, their reflections on the meaning and makings of American identity, and where they find the sublime in their work and the people they encounter.

A book signing with Amy Sherald will follow the talk.

About the Speakers

W. Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian, director, producer, husband, and dad. For seven seasons, he was the host and executive producer of the five-time Emmy Award–winning CNN docu-series United Shades of America. In 2023 he won an Emmy for his HBO documentary 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. He also won a Peabody Award for his 2022 Showtime docu-series We Need to Talk About Cosby. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Do the Work: An Antiracist Activity Book and the author of The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6′ 4″, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. His newest writing project is the substack newsletter, Who’s With Me? His comedy special, Private School Negro, is available on Netflix. Kamau is on the board of directors for DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that helps teachers raise money for class projects, and Live Free, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence, mass incarceration, and mass criminalization. Kamau is also the ACLU’s Celebrity Ambassador for Racial Justice. In 2023, Kamau and his wife Melissa Hudson Bell co-founded Who Knows Best Productions, a media production company in Oakland, CA. He cares too much and sleeps too little.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, and now based in the New York City area, Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits. She received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and her BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University. In 2016, Sherald was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; she also received the Anonymous Was A Woman award in 2017 and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, the Pollock Prize for Creativity, and the David C. Driskell Prize in 2018. In 2018, Sherald was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery. Her work is held in public collections such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.