Across nearly 50 portraits in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s sweeping Amy Sherald exhibition, you’ll find a host of ordinary subjects. A cowboy stands in a stars-and-stripes shirt, a girl daintily balances an oversized teacup, and a boy perches high atop a playground slide. But their everydayness reveals something far deeper: the striking individuality and complexity that make up the American identity.
Fittingly, Sherald has titled her first major museum survey “American Sublime,” a nod to poet Elizabeth Alexander as much as the 18th-century aesthetic theory. To encounter the sublime, according to the Romantics, is to be overcome by awe and reverence. Nature can afford such an experience, but so too can art, noted Rujeko Hockley, the museum’s associate curator who organized the show.
Installation view of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Tiffany Sage / BFA.com.
“When I think of Amy’s show, her work in general, and what it means here to have an exhibition called ‘American Sublime,’ I think about her relationship to the history of art, painting, and portraiture, and her very intentional elevation of Black Americans,” she told me. “It’s about being overwhelmed in the face of the incredible range, breadth, and diversity of the American people.”
The show arrays Sherald’s portraits from 2007 to present, which advance yet subvert American realist traditions. Many of them share certain hallmarks—her use of grisaille, for one, which renders her subjects’ skin in gray tones to defeat notions of color as race—but are also remarkably distinct. Some sitters are placed amid amorphous backgrounds and others, more recently, within vivid magic-realist scenes; they are distinguished by their dress and stance. All hold the viewer with a self-possessed gaze.
But how their identity is read remains fluid, shifting in interpretation as the work is interacted with, as Sherald intended. “I want my portraits to create a space,” she has said, “where Blackness can breathe.”
Amy Sherald, What’s precious inside of him does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American) (2017). Photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The artist, of course, is best known for her portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama (so popular it doubled the attendance of D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery) and Breonna Taylor, both of which are included here. But in the years before, since, and in between, she has honed and evolved her practice to unpack and center the expanse of Black narratives—all the better to usher them into the canon of American art.
And her sprawling project has had much to mine: “The American people is the most expansive container out there,” Hockley noted.
Proof is in the exhibition, which has traveled to New York from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (it touches down at the National Portrait Gallery in September). For the best way into the show and Sherald’s multilayered oeuvre, we asked Hockley to spotlight six artworks that capture the painter’s vision of the American sublime.
Hangman (2007)
Amy Sherald, Hangman (2007). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Kelvin Bulluck.
The earliest work in the show, Hangman has rarely been seen since it was purchased by a private collector. Its emergence for the Whitney iteration of “American Sublime” offers a peek into how Sherald’s technique has evolved over decades.
The work depicts a Black man in profile, accompanied by three textured bands that hold the faint silhouettes of haunting specters. Its title, said Hockley, “is Amy’s most direct allusion to the history of American racialized violence.” Yet, however heavy its theme, the curator reads a sense of revelatory, almost religious, light in how the subject is pictured levitating alongside three bronze-looking figures (the effect, Hockley said, was created by Sherald reusing and repainting over the canvas).
“You see the primary figure but you also see these Three Graces, almost. It feels like there are these Classical references and aesthetics, even though she’s thinking about the 21st century,” Hockley added. “It feels like a painting that you would see in a Renaissance church, where you get to the end of the nave and you’re overwhelmed by the communion with something larger than yourself.”
Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces In Between (2018)
Amy Sherald, Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces In Between (2018). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Joseph Hyde.
In a departure from her saturated backgrounds, this 2018 work sees Sherald land her subjects amid a constructed world for the first time. In it, two women stand hand in hand amid a golden field while a rocket takes off in the far distance. One is transfixed on the launch and the other turns to look back toward the viewer. The horizon is hung low; the sky dominates the painting.
The work conveys the marvel at human engineering, of the “expansion of the natural world,” in Hockley’s words. But there’s a sense of looking forward as much as gazing back, as embodied by Sherald’s sitters.
“This painting, for me, really captures the incongruity of how these little earth-bound creatures have created the technology to go to the moon and to physically, literally do it,” she said. “There’s the mystery of this reality, but also the wonder of it.”
As American as Apple Pie (2020)
Amy Sherald, As American as Apple Pie (2020). Courtesy that artist and Hauser and Wirth. © Amy Sherald. Photo: Joseph Hyde.
Related to the title “American Sublime,” said Hockley, is the well-worn idea of the American Dream. And here, Sherald offers us one such aspirational vision.
The couple at the center the work appears with all the trappings of Americana: the car, the white picket fence, the suburban street. He appears natty in denim and Chuck Taylors, and she chicly clad in pink, with a nod to Barbie, that quintessential American product. The painting offers a 21st-century response to American Gothic, Grant Wood’s celebrated 1930 canvas that encapsulated the nation’s rural values—while leaving room for a sense of “rupture,” said Hockley.
“What is the American dream? Is it attainable? Is it the same then as it was now?” she asked. “Who is the American Dream available to? Is this couple living the American Dream? They look like they are, but they don’t look like what we’ve perhaps been told the people who get to live the American Dream look like.”
Freeing Herself Was One Thing, Taking Ownership of that Freed Self Was Another (2019)
Amy Sherald, Freeing Herself Was One Thing, Taking Ownership of that Freed Self Was Another (2019), on the far left, on view at “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Tiffany Sage / BFA.com.
The exploration of self-expression is a universal phenomenon, Hockley noted, but in this 2019 portrait of a red-headed young woman, the curator reads something distinctly American. Perhaps it’s something in the nation’s sense of itself, she said, where “there has historically been such a focus on youth culture and the ways young people drive culture.”
The youth at the center of this work appears on the cusp of transformation—her striped top and leather jacket painting her as a teenager even as the rag doll she clutches represents a sign of childhood. “There’s an intensity of that moment at that age,” said Hockley of this dichotomy.
Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014). Photo courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In theme, the work echoes that of Sherald’s Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)—also in the show and on the cover of the New Yorker‘s March 24 issue—a portrait of a girl in a whimsical polka dot dress handling a large teacup and saucer. She’s playing dress-up, experimenting with fashion as much as her identity.
“It’s this internal diversity, even in one person,” Hockley said of these sitters’ shifting presentations. “We have so many different sides to ourselves. Nothing is fixed.”
If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019)
Amy Sherald, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019). © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Acquired by the Whitney in 2020, this painting heads out on view at the museum for the first time in “American Sublime.” It’s a surreal one: a man, dressed in a white top and striped trousers, sits serenely on a steel beam, one so high up that only sky appears behind him. The piece’s equally poetic title is borrowed from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
An evident inspiration for the work is Charles C. Ebbets’s iconic 1932 photograph of steelworkers having lunch while perched on a steel beam soaring high above New York City. But, as Hockley pointed out, Sherald’s subject is clearly no hard-hatted workman. “He’s so fashionable, he doesn’t look like he’s on break from construction work,” she noted. “There’s an interesting incongruity there.”
And that’s not the painting’s only departure from reality. The man appears, after all, on top of the world—”higher than any skyscraper,” said Hockley—his orange beanie just about touching the clear sky. His ascension is a mystery, but the vibe is euphoric.
“He’s floating alone, above the clouds. That expansive blue sky just feels so uplifting, elevated, kind of celestial,” said Hockley.
Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024)
Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024) on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com
A centerpiece of the exhibition, Ecclesia is Sherald’s newest, most ambitious work—and her most enigmatic. Each panel in the triptych features a similar scene of a person peering out of a small watchtower on stilts, but each figure hangs out differently. Two of them look out at the viewer, one of them shielding her eyes against the sun, while the middle character stares fixedly toward her right, as if toward the horizon.
The work is rich in symbolism. The figures don clothes representing the weather (the sun, clouds, and a rainbow); each tower is topped by a weathervane bearing a carving of a different animal (a turtle, whale, and dolphin); and the wind is blowing in different directions on each canvas. And why are the shadows falling differently across the panels? Why is one of the women holding a handkerchief?
Sherald may have picked up from Wes Anderson, particularly the coastal scenes in Moonrise Kingdom, though Hockley also stressed the painter’s penchant for magic realist art and films, ones “not so rooted in reality.” The triptych, too, bears traditional iconography yet feels contemporary, straddling time as much as space.
And while the title does nod to community (“ecclesia” is Greek for “assembly”), Hockley almost prefers to have the work defy meaning and gravity.
“What makes it feel connected to this idea of the American Sublime is because it’s like the imagination untethered. It can float free of references or a one-to-one meaning,” she said. “It can be about illusions and making connections in this more idiosyncratic, individual, and imaginative way.”
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York, April 9–August 10, 2025. More
