In the contemplative gazes of Amy Sherald’s characters, we might see ourselves, our friends and family, or any passersby. The Georgia-born artist situates her meticulous figurative paintings in the tradition of American Realism. Her focus on the universal, the “ordinary,” is characteristic of the movement, which has historically been defined by writers like Mark Twain and Henry James, and painters like Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. American Sublime, Sherald’s mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, presents her paintings as a refreshing expansion of its canon, and prompts us to consider the long-term disregard of Black representational painters such as Charles White, Laura Wheeler Waring, Archibald Motley Jr., or Barkley L. Hendricks, from mainstream conversations of figuration.
Sherald’s subjects — fashionably dressed Black people rendered in shades of gray — tell a story. She scouts, styles, poses, and photographs them, conceiving a narrative for each one. Roaming the galleries of the show, I thought of writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, and their poetic yet unflinching refusal to look away from the everyday horrors of American life. Among the ultimate chroniclers of Black American experience, their writings offer a biting, blood-stained context for American Realism from the perspective of African Americans. Sherald has cited these women as among her conceptual guiding lights in developing her artistic ethos — on the walls of American Sublime are paintings whose titles nod to Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Lucille Clifton. Sherald knits historic, cinematic, and literary references into many of her artworks, embedding their legacies into the distinct visual world she’s created.
Experiencing Sherald’s portraits up close and in person floored me, stirring an unexpected slew of emotions. Installed at average eye level, I stood face to face with these life size figures and their assured, deliberative gazes, suggesting complex interiorities in spite of their enigmatic facial expressions. The longer you linger, the more their nuances seem to unfold.
The chronological layout leads you through Sherald’s older work to her latest pieces, which are bigger, grander, more luscious, and more detailed. Her technical skill is obvious, and has improved in strides throughout her career, nearly two decades of which American Sublime covers. An embroidered shirt in the portrait “A bucket full of treasures (Papa gave me sunshine to put in my pockets…)” (2020) looks so naturalistic, I had to lean in to guarantee that she hadn’t threaded through the linen canvas.
Still, her earliest painting, “Hangman” (2007), struck me immediately. A man’s limbs mingle with Sherald’s distinctive splotches, created by turpentine drips, as he rises through the canvas, three watchful silhouettes barely visible in the background. Its metallic tones recall 12th-century crucifixion paintings, and its title clues you in to its historical reference point — the atrocities of Jim Crow lynch mobs. He appears peaceful, his eyes shut and neck extended toward the heavens. This is one of the only artworks on view where the subject’s eyes do not meet ours. It is a powerful refusal, a moment of reclaimed autonomy in the face of a wretched history. Taken together with the exhibition’s centerpiece, “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” (2018), the artist’s infamous painting of the nation’s only Black First Lady, we’re invited to contemplate the monumental journey of Black people in the United States.
The portrait commission was the defining moment of Sherald’s career. In the exhibition, it is the only canvas sheathed by protective glass, while the others are displayed unframed. The painting is siloed in its own gallery, separating it from the others on view, which are presented together, as if the figures are in conversation, or in community, with one another. Separating Obama’s portrait from the rest of the curation, which warmly celebrates the livelihoods of “ordinary” Black people, felt pronounced. Removing the First Lady’s portrait from this conversation seems to overly exalt it, yet conveys volumes about our political moment and its stratifications. The likeness has been meaningful for many, but its display at the Whitney only highlighted my concerns about privileging political figures as symbols of progress on the basis of diversity alone, and the hollow core of representational politics.
Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old medical worker murdered by police officers on March 13, 2020, inversely underscores this point. Falling two years after the completion of Michelle Obama’s portrait, Taylor’s tragic death spotlighted the persisting brutality of anti-Blackness and ignited protests and conversations around race globally. Approaching the painting, I was stunned. I had seen the image before, on the cover of Vanity Fair, after it was commissioned by journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to decorate the September 2020 issue of the magazine. Presented in the gallery, however, Taylor’s likeness is imbued with a potent emotional heft that moved me to tears. Consulting Taylor’s family, Sherald adorned the young woman in a bright turquoise dress against an aquamarine background; a delicate cross hangs around her neck, and on her finger an engagement ring alludes to the proposal her boyfriend had planned before her death. Taylor’s visage is presented on its own wall, but in a light-filled section of the galleries, with other portraits on all sides, a reminder of the lost connections to her peers and family.
In the years since painting Michelle Obama’s portrait, Sherald’s artworks have grown in size and detail. The artist has shifted in her approach to storytelling, her parables more pronounced, more monumental. “For love, and for country” (2022) reimagines the famous “V-J Day in Times Square” (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt as a kiss between men, while “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024) envisions the Statue of Liberty as a “non-binary trans-femme person,” as the wall text states. These queer portraits, facing one another in the exhibition, are among the largest on view. Rather than looking directly at them, we are asked to look up, to revere, to celebrate. In “Kingdom” (2022), a young boy stands atop an aluminum slide, its metallic surface rendered gorgeously. Surrounded by open sky, he appears triumphant. The work called to mind an earlier Sherald portrait depicting a teen in a superhero t-shirt, “Innocent You, Innocent Me” (2016), a critique of the “adultification” of Black children and the lethal consequences of this insidious facet of structural racism.
In a short documentary screening in American Sublime, Sherald recounts her first encounter with a portrait of a Black man in a museum, during a sixth-grade field trip, as a defining moment in her identity formation. Many Black artists and critics, myself included, could tell you a similar story. For some children, Sherald’s canvases may serve that same purpose, introducing them to their first Black face in the museum space. This is something they can carry, as I, and perhaps Sherald, hold the works of Morrison, Hurston, and more, to guide us.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan) through August 10. The exhibition was organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Sarah Roberts, formerly of SFMoMA, and the Whitney’s Rujeko Hockley, with David Lisbon.