What Is the ‘American Sublime’? Amy Sherald’s Biggest Museum Show Ever Has an Answer

There are nearly 50 paintings in Amy Sherald’s biggest museum show to date, currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and set to touch down at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in April. Each and every one of them—most famously, of course, her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama—features African American subjects in colorful, fashionable outfits, their skin carefully rendered in shades of gray.

“Grisaille is originally a Renaissance technique, but Sherald uses it in effect to minimize the associations with race,” SFMOMA associate curator Auriel Garza told me during a walk-through of the show. “It also creates a nice connection with black and white photography.”

But Sherald’s reliance on grayscale does not mean the 51-year-old artist’s work has not evolved since she first hit upon this signature style in 2008. The exhibition includes her largest and most ambitious paintings to date, including a monumental new triptych—her first—titled Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), that greets visitors at the show’s entrance.

All three canvases depict a solitary figure looking out from a white watchtower, set against a bright blue sky. Their clothing is coded with references to the weather—one top features an orange-hued sunrise, the second is patterned with rain clouds, and the last is rainbow striped.

“The figures in the painting are kind of looking out into the horizon, perhaps manifesting that brighter future,” Garza said, noting that the title comes from the Ancient Greek word for the assembly of citizens.

And Sherald’s work hasn’t just grown in scale. Her compositions, all based on photographs she takes in the studio, have become more complex.

She now carefully outfits her sitters from her fully stocked wardrobe, rather than painting them in their own clothes—one room displays a painting alongside the original clothes worn by the sitter, as well as a photo of Sherald at work in her studio—and even builds sets for her backdrops.  For the 2019 painting , she rented a larger studio and filled it with hundreds of gallons of sand to bring the beach scene to life.

Sherald designed the watch tower in Ecclesia, which is topped with different antique weather vanes in the three panels, based on the phone booth in a scene from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. (She’s also spoken before about her love of the lighthouse tower scene in his .)

“It’s nice to see a painter in a mid career moment who is getting more and more dexterous,” SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford told me. “She is actually getting better.”

Bedford has known Sherald and her work for years—he came to San Francisco in 2022 after six years leading the Baltimore Museum of Art. The artist, who now lives in Jersey City, moved to Baltimore in her twenties to get her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Even after graduating in 2004, Sherald called the city home for many years.

“She was one of the last artists to study with abstract expressionist Grace Hartigan,” Garza said.

Many of Sherald’s early works feature an element she developed under Hartigan’s tutelage, with unusual bubble-like splatters spreading across her bright, jewel-toned backgrounds.

“Grace was really giving her a hard time in the studio, trying to get her work to push the boundaries of her practice,” Garza said. “In a moment of frustration, Sherald splattered turpentine on a canvas with the intention of starting over. When she came back to the studio the next day, she discovered there was this beautiful texture, and she realized she could harness that to great effect.”

That surface is characteristic of Sherald’s earlier paintings. Later, she began favoring a more flat colored ground, and in more recent works the figures—now there is often more than one—have begun to live in a less abstract world, like the golden field in Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between (2018).

But from the beginning, Sherald’s work resonated with viewers, her deft use of grayscale adding a reverence and gravitas to her loving depictions of African Americans. Her work highlights the importance of representation, of Black people controlling their own images, and of those images becoming part of the American art canon.

When the artist was commissioned to create Michelle Obama’s official portrait for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., it seemed like the kind of star-marking turn more common in the movie industry than the art world.

The painting was a sensation, inspiring a childrens’ book and drawing such huge crowds that it needed to be moved to a bigger room, and Sherald signed with mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. (The painting’s forthcoming homecoming as part of the exhibition’s tour will be the NPG’s first-ever solo show of a Black woman artist.)

But if it seemed like Sherald had arrived overnight, her sudden rise to prominence upon the portrait’s unveiling in 2018 was actually the culmination of years of carefully honing her practice. She had won the NPG’s $25,000 portrait competition in 2016, and by that point there were 50 to 60 people and institutions on the waitlist to buy one of her paintings.

The lenders for the SFMOMA show, therefore, are some of the country’s most seasoned collectors. (There are loans from the likes of CNN’s Anderson Cooper; sportscaster Bryant Gumbel, artist couple Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian; investment billionaire Robert F. Smith; and collectors Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt; and Bill and Christy Gautreaux.)

“There were only two or three cases where multiple works came from a single collection. Each loan has its own series of negotiations, and the collectors are really advanced collectors,” Garza said. “Our standard loan agreement didn’t work for a lot of them!”

All but two of the works are hung at eye level to meet the viewers’ gaze, and, as per the artist’s preference, without frames. The two exceptions are Sherald’s only commissioned paintings—the Obama portrait, and one of Breonna Taylor, created for the September 2020 cover of Vanity Fair at the behest of guest editor Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Sherald wanted the museum to show the painting of Taylor, who was killed in her own home in 2020, alongside other depictions of young women, in a gallery that’s been titled “The Girl Next Door.” (The work is jointly owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the Speed Art Museum in Taylor’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.)

For Sherald, but also for Taylor’s family, who were closely involved in the work’s creation and its display here, it was important to show the portrait alongside other depictions of young women. Each of the figures in the gallery is someone you or I could know—a sister, a friend, a neighbor—a reminder for viewers that Taylor was more than the tragic headlines that surrounded her death.

Seeing the painting in person for the first time, I got full body chills, overwhelmed by the senseless loss that it represented. The work’s power is undeniable, Taylor seemingly frozen in time against a sea of aqua, the background inspired by her birthstone, alexandrite.

“Sherald wanted to create a sense of radiance around the figure, a color that would energize her, to try to capture her very warm, vital presence, hoping to create an image that would live on and outlive the narrative of violence around her,” Garza said.

The exhibition also marks the first time SFMOMA has been able to display its own Sherald, the 10-foot-tall painting (2022) acquired in 2024. It is the artist’s version of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995) photograph (1945), of a soldier kissing a nurse in jubilation upon learning that World War II was over. In her work, Sherald reimagines the figures as two queer Black men—a fitting work for the museum given San Francisco’s historic embrace of the LGTBQ community.

“Sherald is really trying to bring stories into the museum that haven’t been told before—and they are Black American stories,” Garza said.

That impulse was also part of the inspiration for the title of the exhibition, “American Sublime,” which Sherald had kept in her back pocket for years waiting for her first major retrospective. (It is from a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, an African American writer who is president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation.)

“The sublime relates back to an 18th century concept of experiences of great emotional magnitude, to experience great beauty or awe,” Garza explained. “And it’s Sherald’s hope that this exhibition will help people celebrate the beauty and the persistence and pride of Black people, and the flourishing of Black culture, despite centuries of racism and oppression. These images hopefully run counter to the narratives of violence or poverty that have characterized fictions of Black life in U.S. media and culture.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com