At the Whitney Museum of Art, portraitist Amy Sherald depicts the interior and exterior lives of modern Black Americans in dazzling Technicolor.
Amy Sherald is more than a painter: she is a herald of an artistic paradigm shift. With American Sublime, the first major museum survey of the Georgia-born artist’s work, she is changing the way we perceive portraiture by focusing her talents on Black Americans as subjects—a community that has often been sidelined in the medium. One of Sherald’s core beliefs is that “images can change the world,” and her paintings set out to do that. From an embracing gay couple to a martyred symbol of a movement to a First Lady, she ushers in a new Americana. From April 9 through August 10, 2025, the Whitney Museum of Art invites visitors to experience fifty dazzling works by one of the most potent American portraitists of the modern day. Amy Sherald: American Sublime was organized by Rujeko Hockley, the Associate Curator at Arnhold, with the assistance of David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.
With works from 2007 to the present, the exhibition takes visitors on a visual journey through Sherald’s career. Taking up the mantle of American realist art, Sherald taps into a vibrant aspect of American culture that her predecessors, like Edward Hopper, did not touch. She forged a career creating depictions of everyday Black people. She rendered pensive, intimate moments in crisp primary colors and cool earth tones against bright pastels, exploring the “wonder of what it is to be a Black American.” Her subjects share a cool self-assurance. Encapsulating the exhibition’s themes, the Whitney Museum writes that “[her] contemplative subjects appear most concerned with their own interiority, prioritizing their own peace and self-realization over how others might perceive them […].” They stand before her, swathed in eye-catching color, with dignified stoicism. Their placid demeanors tap into something deeply human and symbolic of a greater ideal: knowing one’s worth and sense of self.
In 2009’s They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, Sherald depicts a girl in a yellow dress emblazoned with strawberries and daisies, her hair pulled back in polka-dotted pigtails. Her eyes have a steady calm, a studied curiosity at odds with her youthful appearance. She tilts her head in a wry manner, intently regarding her portraitist. Considering the lyrical sparring between the historic, pejorative term ‘redbone’ and the innocent conjuring of Strawberry Shortcake, one cannot help but imagine how this girl views the world around her. How does she grapple with the labels it has foisted upon her, and, ultimately, how she chooses to see herself? The exhibition’s curatorial team muses that a motif in Sherald’s work is “[the] split between a person’s inner life and the face they show to the world.” To remedy this internal division, she “[presents] figures who are liberated from the performance of race, gender, religion, or other preconceived identity markers.”
In 2022’s For Love, and for Country, Sherald turns a traditional American depiction of patriotism and heterosexuality on its head. Drawing a cultural allusion to Eisenstaedt’s famed 1945 photograph, V-J Day in Times Square, which depicts a romantic interlude between a soldier and a woman, Sherald recasts the sepia-toned white couple with a vibrant depiction of two gay Black men, both donning sailors’ apparel. While the original captures an interaction between opposites, man and woman, soldier and civilian, in Sherald’s work, these men are aligned in gender and occupation. With the striking, unapologetic depiction of male love, Sherald seeks to shine the light upon “[…] the Black soldiers who returned from the war to a still-segregated society” while “[advocating] for a more nuanced understanding of masculinity.”
Sherald and her subjects may have grown in scope and cultural relevance in recent years, but the depth and themes have remained resonant. In 2017, she was commissioned to produce a portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Three years later, against a cultural backdrop of racial and political division and a worldwide health crisis, Vanity Fair commissioned her to capture Breonna Taylor, a young emergency room technician and victim of American police brutality who became a rallying symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the divide between their fates and stations in life, under Sherald’s careful paintbrush, the two women are united in elegance, serenity, and dignity as modern Black American women.
Like Sherald’s other works, Obama and Taylor look squarely—defiantly—into the artist’s eyes, who becomes an avatar for society at large. They are both depicted in gowns, which highlights a soft, assured femininity. Obama is seated, her right arm positioned beneath her chin, almost alluding to Rodin’s famed Le Penseur (The Thinker) sculpture. Her right arm clasping her hip, Taylor does not stand down the artist so much as the country and institutions that failed her. Both paintings seem to declare, Here I am. Both embody the sublimity, the pride, the pain, and the defiance of the American experience.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime showing through until August 10th 2025.
Home page: Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014. Oil on canvas, 54 × 43 × 2 1/2 in. Private Collection. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde. Inside image from left to right; The Bathers, 2015. Oil on canvas, 72 1/8 × 67 × 2 1/2 in. Private Collection. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde; Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 23/4 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery; Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country, 2022. Oil on linen, 123 1/4 × 93 1/8 × 2 1/2 in. (313 × 236.5 × 6.4 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde.
