Amy Sherald unveils her large-scale triptych Ecclesia to Anderson Cooper

Amy Sherald showed Anderson Cooper her triptych Ecclesia, a work she said took her half a year to paint and that is much larger in scale than her earlier paintings. The piece, titled Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), marked a clear leap in size and ambition for the portraitist known for images of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor.

The larger format mattered because Sherald was not simply enlarging a familiar subject. Ecclesia stretches her portrait practice into a three-panel composition that gives the work a more expansive, public-facing presence than her smaller canvases. Sherald framed that shift in direct terms, saying, "It's like the pinnacle for me... I'm hoping that it's pointing me towards a direction that I will go in the future."

The title itself points to a broader civic idea. In a separate description of the work, curator Rujeko Hockley said Ecclesia is another word for a meeting place or church, "so there's thinking here about how we come together, about what it means to come together." That reading fits the scale of the piece: the triptych format turns the painting from a single image into something closer to a proposition about gathering, inheritance, and where Sherald's work can go next.

For Sherald, the significance of Ecclesia lies not only in its size but in what that size allows her to attempt. The painting signals a painter testing the outer limits of her own language, moving beyond the compressed space of earlier portraits into a work that asks to be read as both an artistic milestone and a new direction.