Vanity Fair will have Breonna Taylor on the front cover of their September issue joining Oprah Magazine in bringing awareness to our continued focus on getting justice for Breonna.
The cover is a painting created by Amy Sherald, who In 2016, was the first black woman to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, “which led to her painting Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018.”
In the piece, Sherald describes her process which typically starts with taking a picture of her subject.
Painting Taylor, a person she had never met, who would never be able to sit for her, presented a unique challenge.
Sherald took extraordinary care in reimagining Taylor, inflecting her portrait with symbols of the 26-year-old’s life.
Sherald found a young woman with similar physical attributes, studied Taylor’s hairstyles and fashion choices and drew inspiration from things she learned about the young woman—that she had been a frontline worker in the battle against COVID-19; that her boyfriend had been about to propose marriage; that she was self-possessed, brave, loving, loved.
“She sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong!” says Sherald. “I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.”
“When thinking about what she was going to wear, I wanted Breonna to like it,” says Sherald. “I wanted her family to look and say, I can see my daughter and sister in this.”
A friend sent Sherald an image of actress Danielle Brooks wearing an Elder piece, and Sherald found Elder on Shoppe Black, a digital platform curated by husband and wife Tony O. Lawson and Shantrelle P. Lewis that showcases Black businesses.
During the painting process, Sherald added movement to the dress, and a slit—“I thought, What would I want if I were 26.”
As for the hues, “painting someone posthumously, I wanted it to feel ethereal but grounded at the same time,” Sherald says.
She tried a rainbow of options, yellows and reds and pinks, but none felt quite right, until she invoked the portrait itself. “
‘Breonna, what color do you want this dress to be? Please, tell me what color you want this dress to be,’ ” Sherald says she mused.
Then she hit on blue, a shade that echoes Taylor’s March birthstone, the aquamarine. “The color that I chose almost had a resplendence to it. The monochromatic color allows you to really focus on her face. The whole painting really becomes about her.”
“I made this portrait for her family,” says Sherald. “I mean, of course, I made it for Vanity Fair, but the whole time I was thinking about her family.”
On Instagram Vanity Fair shared the below post to highlight the issue:
The Vanity Fair Cover
The painting is just beautiful. Read more here.
The cover story for this issue was written by Ta-Nehisi Coats and he calls it “The Great Fire”.
Read below:
“I don’t know how else to comprehend the jackboots bashing in Breonna Taylor’s door and spraying her home with bullets, except the belief that they were fighting some Great Fire—demonic, unnatural, inhuman.”
Coates chose the “The Great Fire” as the theme for the issue, which assembles activists, artists, and writers to offer a portrait of hope in a world where the possibility of a legitimate anti-racist majority is emerging for the first time in American history. For his cover story, Coates tells Breonna’s story through the words of her mother.
The caption:
And I am telling you it kills my whole family. Breonna is like the family glue—even at 26 years old, she is pretty much the glue. And she is bossy.
She don’t care what is happening, she is going to make sure we get together and have a game night or have a cookout or have something, because we all tend to get so busy and consumed with work and whatever. But she has a personal relationship with everybody, even all my little cousins.
They don’t call each other cousins. They all call each other sisters and brothers. All the kids, the younger kids, or even the kids her age, looked up to Breonna.
And my dad stops turning on the television. Breonna was his first granddaughter. To see what happened, to hear what happened, it breaks his heart and he can’t stand it. And Juniyah is depressed. She is just going through the motions. Because she’s used to seeing Breonna every day, and arguing with Breonna every other day.”
