The artist behind Breonna Taylor’s September 2020 Vanity Fair cover art, Amy Sherald, donated $1 million for three fellowships and up to four scholarships at the University Of Louisville.
According to the school’s official website, the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowships and Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarships would be rewarded to eligible undergraduate law students.
Students with 60 or more credit hours who partake in legal volunteer positions with social justice nonprofit organizations or agencies during summer 2023 would be able to apply. They would be required to demonstrate a commitment to social justice via an application essay.
The first fellowship is scheduled to be awarded in the summer of 2023, and scholarships will be awarded, beginning with one student in fall 2023, two in 2024, three in 2025, and four in the following years. They would be $9,000 apiece and $7,000 apiece, respectively.
Sherald’s large donation came from the trust she created after The Speed Art Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture purchased her iconic painting.
The portrait is also set to make its way to Louisville, where 26-year-old Taylor was tragically killed in 2023. She was fatally shot five times in her apartment in March 2020 after seven police officers forced their way into her home. The officers entered her home as part of a drug-dealing investigation operation involving an individual that didn’t even live at Taylor’s residence.
“Nothing can take away the injustice of Breonna Taylor’s death,” University of Louisville’s Interim Vice President for Community Engagement Douglas Craddock Jr. said. “But what we must do is create spaces where Breonna Taylor is remembered and where her legacy can inspire us to carry on the hard work of erasing inequality and divisiveness. Amy Sherald’s gift will have transformative power for the law school fellows and scholarship recipients who will benefit from her decision to use her artistic gift to help heal the corrosiveness of hatred and animosity.”
“It’s an honor and a blessing to have people continuously honor Breonna and want to help out in any way,” Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, reportedly said.
In the Vanity Fair issue, Sherald created an illustration describing the police brutality victim, saying she was an “American girl. She [was] a sister. A daughter and a hard worker. Those are the kinds of people that I am drawn towards.”
She also received the University Of Louisville’s law school’s first Darryl T. Owens Community Service Award, presented to her by Kentucky State Senator Gerald Neal.
“Rep. Owens was a lifelong public servant advocating on behalf of the Louisville community. It is in recognition of that same community that I seek to honor the memory of Breonna Taylor through my work,” Sherald said in a recent statement.
