Sherell Chillik is an African American Painter from Detroit, MI. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the College for Creative Studies in 2018. She currently attends the Cranbrook Academy of Art MFA program for Painting. Chillik began showing her work in competitive national and regional fine art exhibitions in 2019. She taught collage and painting classes for students with disabilities through the Michigan Arts Access Teaching Artist Residency in 2023. In 2024, she attended the Anderson Ranch Art Center Residency in Snowmass Village, CO. Her most recent shows include the “96th MI Contemporary Art Exhibition” at Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, MI, and the “43rd Annual Juried competition ‘A Sense of Place”, at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, Georgia.

Sherell's figurative paintings and mixed-media works capture humanity through a Black lens. She is interested in the reliance of the supernatural by Black Americans to persevere through historical hardships like slavery and racism, to contemporary problems surrounding the circulation and ownership of one's image. 

She works in tandem with materials like nonfiction and historically based Black Life Fiction novels, ancestry, American church culture, antique shops, historical civil rights leaders, and the Harlem Renaissance. Chillik begins by collaging historical material with Black myths to retell and/or add to uncommon narratives. She is capturing the complexity of the ordinary Black experience and the glue (spiritual) that holds it together through figurative painting.

Chillik uses traditional and contemporary techniques to build many thin layers on paper and canvas, adding depth to each figure and the atmosphere they inhabit. Her figures are approached in a traditionalist manner, while the backgrounds lean towards romanticism and use mark-making to blend time and space. Her background creates a sense of mystification surrounding time, while her figures are of the present. Her narrative painting palette radiates Midwest magical realism undertones through the mixing of heavenly blues, golden yellows, sultry greens, and rich reds. She enjoys the juxtaposition of history and the present to capture the Black gaze through traditional and contemporary materials on canvas, paper, and fabric.