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We have been honored to feature the work of hundreds of artists in the magazine over the past thirty years. While many of these artists have built strong practices, a handful have gone on to attain critical and commercial success on an international level. The juror of this issue, Amy Sherald, is one such artist.

Arguably the publication’s best-known alumna, Amy is the first artist ever to serve as juror. After repeated submissions of her work to New American Paintings for consideration––yes, we don’t always get it right the first time––it was selected for publication in 2010. At that point, she was in her thirties, still very much an emerging artist who was supplementing her income by waiting tables. Though Amy has often credited the appearance of her work in New American Paintings as a significant career milestone, bigger things were right around the corner. In 2016, Amy received the Outwin Boochever Prize from the National Portrait Gallery, which brought her added prominence. With the unveiling of her 2018 commissioned portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, her work entered the public’s consciousness. Since then, she has continued to produce one extraordinary painting after another and to participate in exhibitions internationally.

How was did Amy enjoy being on the other side of the process and serving as juror for New American Paintings? By all accounts, she relished the opportunity. As with all of our jurors, Amy was presented with the task of sifting through the work of several hundred artists…

The art gathered in this issue of New American Paintings is as diverse as the region from which it hails, but one theme—with two conjoined parts—does emerge: the inscription of sexual and social identities into domestic and more-or-less “natural” environments. Again and again, these interlinked sites—whether recognizably of our imperfect world or made by artists out of whole cloth—provide arenas for the definition and deconstruction of human convention. And when the two realms overlap, the unpredictability of “wild” life encroaches on our own manicured and stage-managed milieux to produce a peculiar interzone in which the very notions of home and belonging, familiarity and control, break down.

In her lovingly rendered paintings of figures, Michelle Doll locates the (notably positive) essence of domesticity in the patterns of human contact. Her intimate scenes of families in bed together reveal a fascination with the formal qualities of their entangled positions and an emotional sensitivity to the myriad ways in which these encode their members’ profound connection. Even the rumpled sheets and blankets that surround each casual grouping—in addition to providing an ideal and time-honored forum for painterly experimentation with abstract pattern and color—convey a familiarity that would be impossible to manufacture. Doll characterizes these paintings as “meditations,” establishing her approach as empathetic and unhurried.

The subjects of Leland Foster’s paintings have a more outwardly contemplative tone, contrasting the comforts of the domestic realm with more uncertain, unpredictable elements. Though also portraying friends and family, Foster suggests a route away from the familiar too,…