Since 2008, Sherald has painted a little over 30 pieces of art. Since her 2012 work "Equilibrium", Sherald has depicted the skin tone of her Black subjects in grayscale rather than flesh tones. Sherald uses the gray hues to challenge an idea of race where skin color automatically assigns a category, part of a broader project to counter what she experienced as the limited narrative available to her growing up in segregated Columbus, Georgia only shortly after the Civil Rights Movement. The choice as well as her process echoed and was reinforced by 19th- and 20th-century black-and-white photographic portraits, especially W.E.B. DuBois's black and white photographs of black people in the 1900 Paris Exposition, which at the time sharply contrasted with other exhibitions' sensationalized displays of black bodies. Sherald said in a round table: "When I finally came across the black-and-white photography, I realized that I was setting these people up and recreating that same kind of quietness and dignity that I saw in these photographs that Black families were having taken of them. I just recognized my work inside of these photographs and started to go further.".