Artist Spotlight: Amy Sherald and the Hard Work of Simply Being
By Tim Gihring
June 16, 2025-For the past few months, in the opening gallery of Mia's "Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys" exhibition, two men have been popping wheelies. Their dirt bikes are angled skyward. One man holds on with a single hand, the other man has let go entirely. There is no ground beneath them, no buildings or horizon, only the blue of sky, as though these two young Black bikers have managed to defy the gravity of everyday life.
Amy Sherald painted them in 2022 on two enormous canvases, facing each other, a diptych she called Deliverance. They were part of the urban dirt bike scene in Baltimore, which Sherald came to know while studying for her MFA in the early 2000s. The bikers-mostly people of color-would ride in rambunctious pelotons, weaving through traffic and, well, popping wheelies.
"Most people consider them a nuisance," Sherald says in a new video about these paintings and their subjects, "but I think there is something so fantastic about their ability to teach themselves these highly skilled ways of riding these dirt bikes. A lot of times their hands are off the bike. There's a sense of freedom."
Recently, when Baltimore began cracking down on the riders, Sherald posted an image of her diptych to social media. "I remain in awe of their skillz," she wrote.
Amy Sherald (American, born 1973), Deliverance, 2022, oil on linen. The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. ยฉ Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Joseph Hyde.
I've been seeing some of the characteristically violent rhetoric about the 12 o'clock boys in #Baltimore, and I want to celebrate our beloved Amy Sherald for celebrating them in her words and work. 1/