The portraitist Amy Sherald is largely known for two paintings she made of Black Americans whose lives have intersected with US history – the first was the official portrait of the former first lady Michelle Obama, and the second was a posthumous image of victim of police brutality, Breonna Taylor, whose murder was a significant factor in sparking the racial uprisings of 2020. Sherald is also well-known for her choice to render the skin color of her Black subjects in grisaille – that is, shades of gray.
Recognized as a major talent in the American art world, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has given Sherald a sizable survey exhibition, one that is worthy of her immense talent, dedication and originality. Titled Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the show collects nearly 50 of her works across the major sweep of her career since 2007, including the aforementioned portraits of Obama and Taylor. The show also features newly commissioned work that Sherald is debuting – these include the opening triptych Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), as well as the closer Trans Forming Liberty in which Sherald poses a trans woman as the Statue of Liberty.
For Sherald, this show marks the realization of a longstanding goal. She said in a video interview that she recalled hoping that she would have her first major museum show at either the SFMOMA or the Whitney in New York – the exact two places where American Sublime will be seen. “I wrote in one of my many journals that I wanted my first museum show to be at the SFMOMA or the Whitney,” she said. “I started making work for the Whitney 10 years ago – I would just tell myself, ‘this painting right here is going to go into the Whitney.’ And lo and behold, now it will.”
The exhibition curator, Sarah Roberts, said the connecting thread of Sherald’s many years of creativity was to represent the lives of everyday Black Americans. “Her central premise is to insert Black stories into the stories of American art,” Roberts said. “Stories that haven’t been told in art history, but that also haven’t been told in popular media, popular culture. Just everyday stories of Black people being themselves and going about their lives.”
To that end, Sherald chose to frame Breonna Taylor as a prototypical American “girl next door”, dressing her in a flowing light blue dress and situating her against a calming blue background. The portrait, which appeared on the cover of the August 2020 issue of Vanity Fair (visitors to the exhibit can browse a copy of the magazine situated near the painting), is less about Taylor as an icon than who she was on a personal level. In preparing for this work, Sherald assiduously studied Taylor’s social media presence and connected with her family and boyfriend in order to develop a deep sense of who she was.
The use of social media is crucial to Sherald’s method of creating, in part because she is immunocompromised, having received a heart transplant in December 2012 at the age of 39. Since that time, and particularly in light of the Covid pandemic, the internet has become central to her creative practice. “Between having to increase my productivity and Covid – being an immune-suppressed person with a heart transplant – I couldn’t really go out into spaces and be where you would find subjects,” she said. “I had to find different ways to find people, and it turned out social media was the easiest way to do that.”
With the exceptions of the portraits of Obama and Taylor, Sherald typically creates imagined narratives for her subjects, taking inspiration from visual media like TikTok and Instagram, and carefully dressing and arranging her models before painting them. Her goal is to populate the art world with images of Black individuals. “I wanted to think very strategically about what kind of voice I would have in the art world,” Sherald said. “I spent a year just trying to figure out what that would be. I developed this idea that, when I look at art history, for the most part I don’t see portraits of people that look like me. So it started there.”
Sherald’s precision shines through in her paintings, as each of her subjects is meticulously dressed, their outfits offering deep indications of their personality, social situation, and the larger narratives that they are a part of. Across the years of her creative output, she had made countless variations on the theme of the Black portrait, imagining new futures for the Black community. Seeing all of these paintings together is a remarkable experience, one that Sherald really relishes. “Sometimes I joke around and say, ‘I’m creating this army.’” she said. “I just couldn’t wait to be in a space where all of these paintings could be together and be in discourse with each other all at once and create this landscape of figures. It’s super exciting.”
The show’s title comes in part from the poetry book of the same name by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, a Pulitzer finalist in 2005. Sherald characterized the volume as one that took on the absence of Black people from landscapes, a concern that is dear to her own artistic practice. Beyond evoking that title, Sherald also said the title American Sublime pointed to the larger project of highlighting Black resilience against a social order that has largely been oppressive in nature for the group. “Sublimity in Black life can be seen in our ability to persist and thrive despite historical and ongoing systemic oppression,” she stated. “Our experience are marked by moments of transcendence and joy – beauty amid struggle, and that is the sublime.”
In addition to engaging profoundly with the struggle for a world in which Black people can thrive, American Sublime also strikes notes in support of the struggles of the LGBTQ+ community. The large-scale 2022 piece For Love, and for Country greets visitors as they make their way into the show’s first gallery – Sherald reimagines Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous 1945 photograph V-J Day in Times Square, in which a triumphant sailor returning from duty in Europe bends a woman back to kiss her in the heart of Manhattan. Here, it is two Black male sailors kissing – a nod both to the many Black soldiers whose contributions to the second world war were not recognized, as well as to the struggles for civil rights of the queer community.
“Amy has thought a lot about her role as an artist and the need for representation, and she has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ rights,” said Roberts. “This work is thinking about who gets depicted as being American. She was painting this work in 2020 and 2021, when all these laws were being passed, when there was a lot of hate and violence against the LGBTQ+ community.”
The exhibition is closed out by the equally huge painting Trans Forming Liberty, which Sherald was inspired to produce after witnessing the transition of a transgender friend. “The platform I have is an important one,” she said, “knowing this painting will be in a museum that is pushing us to understand our place in society and what’s valuable. When I think about America, I think about transgender people – I wanted trans people to be a part of the conversation that I’m having.”
For the piece, Sherald worked with a trans model named Arewa, originally meaning to paint her in an entirely different way than as the Statue of Liberty. But as the model took on different dresses and poses, Sherald was immediately intrigued when she adopted a posture like that of Lady Liberty. She asked her assistant to quickly grab a roll of paper towels, which she instructed Arewa to hold aloft like a torch, and they made a photo of the scene for later. “It ended up being the one that felt so right for this moment, “she said. “Especially after the election of Donald Trump – it’s a community that is so vulnerable.”
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is a masterful exhibition that should be seen – either on its west coast run at the SFMOMA or when it makes its way to the Whitney in the spring of 2025. It is a testament to both capturing the lived experience of Black people in America and and to imagining better futures for them. “This work is about wanting to create narratives and recognizing the power of storytelling,” said Sherald. “I wanted to harness that to create something that could be useful and beautiful – fantastical and free and frolicky.”
