Columbus native featured on ‘60 Minutes.’ What she said and how to watch
A Columbus-born artist was featured in a segment on the world-renowned CBS news show “60 Minutes.”
Amy Sherald, a painter known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper to discuss her work, inspiration and her withdrawal of her art show “American Sublime” this summer from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Sherald told the Ledger-Enquirer in July she withdrew the show because of concerns about censorship regarding her piece “Trans Forming Liberty,” which depicts a transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty.
“This painting exists to hold space for someone whose humanity has been politicized and disregarded,” Sherald said in the statement sent to the Ledger-Enquirer in July. “I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship, especially when it targets vulnerable communities.”
The Smithsonian came under scrutiny from the Trump administration in an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order says the Smithsonian “has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
In her interview with Cooper, Sherald discussed her artistic journey from waiting tables to receiving a heart transplant and her famous use of gray paint for her subjects’ skin tone.
Sherald told “60 Minutes” she originally just liked the gray color and it reminded her of old family photographs. Herald also told Cooper she uses gray instead of brown because she thinks “it offers the viewer an opportunity to pause and consider something else before we get to that.”
In the “60 minutes” interview, Sherald said she knew she wanted to be a painter after seeing a Black man in a painting for the first time during her sixth-grade field trip to the Columbus Museum. The painting was “Object Permanance” by another Columbus native artist, Bo Bartlett.
If you missed the segment, you can watch the full “60 Minutes” interview of Sherald on the CBS News website.
This story was originally published October 22, 2025 at 1:50 PM.