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“I wanted to evoke a sense of beauty, majesty, and emotional depth that often gets overlooked in portrayals of Black life,” says Amy Sherald. It’s a few days after the opening of her new exhibition, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show’s title—partly inspired by Elizabeth Alexander’s poetry collection of the same name—crystallizes that intention. “The term sublime has historically been associated with grandeur and awe, especially in landscape painting, but I’m applying it to portraiture,” Sherald explains. “I’m challenging what is traditionally seen as worthy of that label and expanding the narrative of what American beauty and identity look like.”
Across nearly 50 artworks spanning the last 18 years, American beauty takes on many forms on Sherald’s canvas. It can appear as ordinary as a woman with natural hair perfectly coiffed and a light blue dress blowing in the wind (as in 2015’s Saint Woman) or as dynamic as two sailors embracing in a Black, queer reimagining of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s legendary 1945 photograph V-J Day in Times Square (Sherald’s For Love, and for Country from 2022).
“She refers to herself as an American realist in the tradition of someone like Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth,” says Rujeko Hockley, an associate curator at the Whitney and the organizer of the show. Those artists, however, “didn’t paint Black and brown people. So now Amy is like, ‘Let me fill that in. Let me do this for my time, my people, and my community. We’re here. We’ve always been here.’”
One of the largest works, As American as apple pie (2020), is new to the Whitney’s presentation of the show. (“American Sublime” was curated by Sarah Roberts, the former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, where it opened last fall.) The painting depicts a couple leaning against a vintage car in front of a bright yellow home on a sunny day—the kind of scene someone might capture outside a family barbecue. The man is dressed casually in slacks, a white top, and a denim jacket, while his partner—the star of the show—wears a pink Barbie shirt, a pleated skirt, and open-toe heels, accessorized with big gold hoops and a flamingo cup in hand.
For Sherald, fashion and aesthetics are integral to her storytelling—important markers of her subjects’ personhood. “Fashion in my work is never incidental,” she says. “For Black Americans, especially in the context of the South”—Sherald comes from Columbus, Georgia, herself—“dress became a quiet form of resistance and a way to claim dignity and agency within a society that often sought to deny both. [In my paintings,] fashion is an intentional reflection of how we all negotiate visibility, respectability, and selfhood in a world that is constantly watching.”
Case in point: what is undoubtedly Sherald’s most iconic portrait to date—Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018). It features the former first lady against a light blue background, wearing a patterned dress by American designer Michelle Smith of Milly. “The dress, the patterning, her nails, her skin, everything—all the details are just perfect,” says Hockley. “It’s a painting that gives Mrs. Obama back to herself in a way that I find incredibly moving as a Black woman.” Still impressive, the portrait commands its own room in the show.
Another theme becomes clear in this survey of Sherald’s work: the artist’s devotion to capturing the joys of the Black American experience. Her women are often shown at rest—taking a moment to sip tea, ride a bike, or go for a swim. “So many of the narratives around Black people are, very understandably, of suffering, violence, deprivation, and lack,” says Hockley. But Sherald chooses to foreground something else: “the joy of autonomy, self-sufficiency, interiority, and protecting your peace.”
The curator continues: “It’s about knowing who you are and standing in your power. Amy’s work is uplifting, but not in a saccharine way. She talks about the wonder and honor of what it is to be a Black American and a Black person in this world, saying, ‘Look at us. Look at how we have survived, look at how we thrive, look at how much joy we take in ourselves, in our families, in our communities, in our self-presentation. Look at how powerful we are.’”
To Sherald, she’s simply doing what she’s always done: painting “what I see and what I feel—people on the margins, people in transition, people being real.” In a world with “more noise, more spectacle,” she admits she sometimes worries “the soul gets lost in all the performance.” But with her vividly beautiful work, Sherald offers an alternative vision. “These are everyday people, but there’s something transcendent about the way they exist in the world,” she says. “That’s the sublime I’m interested in—a quiet, powerful assertion of being.”
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 10.