In their depiction of Black men, women, and children at ease, with few markers of place, time, or context beyond the clothes they wear, Amy Sherald’s paintings address the historical omission of Black people in portraiture. A virtuoso at world-building on canvas, Sherald conveys the interior emotion of her subjects through the deft positioning of a hand or tilt of a face, the careful curation of clothes and color, and titles that point to underlying themes.
Sherald is perhaps best known for her portraits of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, though most of her works defy the traditional definition of portraiture. She chooses individuals who, for her, embody a particular idea or narrative she wants to put forth in the world. She then develops a story within each work through the figure’s pose and facial expression, and the use of color, clothing, and titling, to arrive at a finished painting. She has described her works as offering a “resting place” to see Black figures simply being themselves. With this approach, Sherald has created a form of figurative painting that transcends portraiture, acknowledging racial identity and moving beyond it to highlight our shared humanity. In an interview for an episode of Art21 featuring her work, Sherald says, “It’s got to be about humanity first, and then everything else has to follow.”
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is the artist’s first mid-career survey and first major museum exhibition. The presentation, featuring 40-plus works from 2007 to 2024, and organized across six thematic galleries, opens this fall at SFMOMA, then travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
ICONIC AMERICA
The title American Sublime has percolated in Sherald’s mind for over a decade, awaiting the right exhibition opportunity. A self-described American realist speaking to the tradition of painters like Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Andrew Wyeth, Sherald’s works reference ideals and imagery historically associated with what it means to be American, with a goal of expanding debates about race and representation. “Sublime” speaks to the general definition of the word, meaning majestic, impressive, or supremely beautiful. It also directly connects to the art historical usage—the idea of feeling awed or insignificant in comparison to the grand scale of the natural world—but Sherald subverts that construct, locating the sublime within the individual rather than the exterior world.
The first gallery includes paintings with particularly American motifs—bathers enjoying a day at the beach, people watching a rocket launch, or a farmer on his tractor. Sherald also draws on images from art history and pop culture, as in the painting For Love, and for Country (2022), which directly references Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 black-and-white photograph of a sailor enthusiastically kissing a nurse in Times Square. Sherald’s ten-foot-tall work envisions the joyful embrace happening between two men, her rebuttal of the rising discrimination and restrictive legislation against the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s got to be about humanity first, and then everything else has to follow.”
Sherald uses photo shoots with models, complete with sets, props, and clothes she has carefully selected, to compose detailed photographs from which she paints. “In a sense, she’s stagecrafting,” says Sarah Roberts, curator of the exhibition. “She’s attending to every detail to create the image that corresponds to the idea she wants to convey.” For the painting, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019), Sherald even had steel girders constructed to recreate the essence of Charles C. Ebbets’s photograph, Lunch atop a Skyscraper (1932), an image of steel workers taking a break on a construction site high above Manhattan. Sherald’s work points to the greatness of American industry, but also the Black workers whose contributions to these advancements have been largely erased from history.
In all her paintings, the figure’s facial expression—particularly the gaze—is critical to establishing a sense of agency for each subject. Sherald says in a Smithsonian Magazine interview, “My portraits are quiet, but they’re not passive. When you consider the African American historical narrative and its ties to the gaze, a glance could result in punishment by lynching. I wanted my sitters to look out and meet your gaze, instead of being gazed upon. Essentially, that’s the beginning of selfhood, a consideration of self which is not reactionary to your environment.”
PRECIOUS FUTURES
Paintings in this gallery center the preciousness and vulnerability of Black children and youth. In The Boy with No Past (2014), for example, Sherald imagines what it would be like to grow up as a young Black man in America without this nation’s legacy of racism and violence as a persistent weight and impediment.
Throughout her work, Sherald uses gray tones to depict her subjects’ skin, employing a painting technique that dates back to the early Renaissance, and encourages viewers to see their interior lives before the color of their skin. As she states in Smithsonian Magazine, “A Black person on a canvas is automatically read as radical when you consider the history of portraiture and the role of picture making and portraits historically. In hindsight, I look back and I’m like, that’s why my figures are gray. I didn’t want the conversation to be marginalized, and I had a fear of that, early on. My figures needed to be pushed into the world in a universal way, where they could become a part of the mainstream art historical narrative. I knew I didn’t want it to be about identity alone.”
MICHELLE OBAMA
Sherald’s iconic painting of former First Lady Michelle Obama is featured in an adjacent gallery. This portrait goes beyond the public portrayal and media narratives of Obama to offer a fuller picture of her as a person with great presence, style, wit, and gravitas.
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
For her portrait of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old woman killed in a botched police raid by Louisville, Kentucky, law enforcement in 2020, Sherald wanted to depict Taylor as a typical girl next door full of vitality, and give her an ongoing positive presence in the world. True to her meticulous approach, Sherald sought just the right model and dress, then relied on a widely published selfie that Taylor took in a car to capture the young woman’s face and expression. The portrait is the centerpiece of this gallery, which will be surrounded by other works depicting vibrant young women.
Though Sherald’s canvas sizes sometimes reach as high as 10 feet, she has worked frequently with a 54-by-43-inch canvas since early in her career. This consistent size creates an added intimacy. “It’s a very human scale, and she always hangs them lower than is typical in a museum, so that viewers meet the faces of her subjects head-on,” Roberts says.
PUBLIC LIFE AND PRIVATE SELF
The divide between one’s public self and private self, and the need to navigate between them, is a frequent theme in Sherald’s work, and is the focus of the next gallery. Sherald grew up in predominantly white Columbus, Georgia, where she was one of just a few Black children in the public school system. She then attended Clark Atlanta University, the oldest historically Black university (HBCU) in the South. Both were formative experiences that shaped her understanding of how identity can shift or be constrained by environment and perceptions.
With its depiction of a stoic woman wearing the uniform of a suburban matriarch—thick pearl necklace, vibrant blue shirt, patterned pants—the painting She had an inside and an outside now, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018) lays out the potential tension between the deliberately private, intimate self and a public self crafted to navigate external preconceptions or norms.
The title of the work, from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, further feeds this narrative. “Sherald rarely starts out with a title,” Roberts says. “She makes the painting then finds the title that expresses what she’s trying to convey. They often tell you a lot about what the idea is in the painting.”
Lines from works of fiction and poetry are frequent inspirations. Two other works on view, Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like (2015) and Freeing herself was one thing, taking ownership of that freed self was another (2015), draw directly from Toni Morrison’s book Beloved. To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes (2022), also included, references the poem “Legacy” by Aileen Cassinetto.
SELF-AFFIRMATION
The last gallery features paintings of people physically and spiritually comfortable in their self-hood. The title for Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own (2016), the anchor work in this section, comes from Lucille Clifton’s poem “what the mirror said.” The speaker says this affirmation before a mirror; the woman in Sherald’s work, composed in demeanor in a striking black-and-white dress and broad-brimmed hat, conceptually embodies this scene and sentiment. In a 2018 article in Bmore Art, writer Kerr Houston notes the influence of sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois on Sherald. Du Bois described the Black American experience as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The subjects in this gallery refuse that dual sense of self and embody strength and self-possession.
The exhibition also will include new works made specifically for debut in San Francisco. With these works, including her first triptych Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024), Sherald continues pushing into new territory, introducing complex narratives among groups of figures and building on her impulse to expand representation of previously marginalized groups in American figure painting.
“I hope people will feel the transformative power of these paintings,” says Roberts of the exhibition. “These works are very accessible and very ambitious in what they ask us to do as a viewer, to probe any preconceptions we carry into the experience of standing in front of these paintings, to examine the thoughts and emotions they bring up for us, to consider how we think about beauty.”
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is on view from November 16, 2024, through March 9, 2025, on Floor 4.
Lead support for Amy Sherald: American Sublime is provided by the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund and Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Major support is provided by Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan, Katie and Matt Paige, and Shelagh Rohlen in memory of Tom Rohlen.
Significant support is provided by Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem, Jessica Moment, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, and Sonja Hoel Perkins and Jonathan Perkins.
Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Dolly and George Chammas, Jessica and Matt Farron, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, Alison Pincus, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, Gary Steele and Steven Rice, and Barbara and Stephan Vermut.
Meaningful support is also provided by Fashion Partner Max Mara.