Amy Sherald finds her people

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — Diana Beasley knew she wanted to spend her 12th birthday at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, surrounded by the paintings of Amy Sherald.

She dressed up for the occasion, wearing a sparkly pink crown reading “BIRTHDAY GIRL” over her neat braids. Diana learned about Sherald in school, she said, and she likes how her art is “realistic, but also a bit cartoony at the same time.”

Her favorite piece by Sherald, she said, was the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. In it, as in most of Sherald’s portraits, the subject looks straight ahead at the viewer. Her skin is not a naturalistic brown but rendered in grays, in the artist’s signature style, draped in a vivid black and white dress with multicolored geometric details and a soft baby blue background. Obama looks determined, Diana said, like “she’s serious about her job.”

That Michelle Obama portrait, presented in front of two benches for attendees to sit and take in her gaze, is one of the main draws of the “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” exhibit, which arrived in Atlanta this month for the final stage of a 17-month national tour. When the painting was unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2018 — in tandem with Kehinde Wiley’s presidential portrait of Barack Obama — it seemed to mark Sherald’s enshrinement in a new official establishment, one in which Black figures and Black perspectives were uncontroversially part of the canon.

Eight years later, Sherald’s work is traveling through a different cultural landscape. “American Sublime” was supposed to have brought Sherald back to the National Portrait Gallery last year, after the tour spent a few months at the Whitney in New York. Then Sherald learned that the federally funded institution wanted to accompany her painting “Trans Forming Liberty,” which shows a Black transgender woman in the stance of the Statue of Liberty, with a video of people reacting to the work — “to contextualize the piece,” as the Smithsonian put it.

Instead, Sherald withdrew the entire show, sending it to the Baltimore Museum of Art instead, and the Trump administration declared that “Trans Forming Liberty” had “fundamentally strayed from the mission and spirit of our national museums.”

Unavoidably, then, Sherald’s mid-career retrospective doubles as a look at the crisis of artistic expression in the country.

Two years ago, her works, with their ordinary subjects, felt celebratory, said Sarah Roberts, who curated “American Sublime” for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shortly before the exhibit’s premiere, SFMOMA purchased Sherald’s “For love, and for country” painting of two Black men kissing while holding sailor hats, a restaging of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square” photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse, as a nod toward the LGBTQ community’s impact in San Francisco.

But as federal and state governments restrict LGBTQ rights, the act of representation becomes one of defiance.

“It feels like more of a commitment,” Roberts said. “Like a reassertion of no, actually this is the America that exists in this museum, in this city, and we are not letting that go.”

The show was a hit in Baltimore, becoming the BMA’s most popular exhibit of the 21st century and drawing more than 80,000 people to the museum. (The museum’s second most popular exhibit since 2000 was its 2016-2017 “Matisse/Diebenkorn” exhibition, which drew 46,000 visitors.)

Sherald’s popularity is in part due to her ability to capture an alternative vision of the US to the one the federal government is promoting. In his second term, President Donald Trump has posted racist social media imagery, squashed research and initiatives that helped minorities, welcomed white South African refugees while banning other African refugees and those from Central and South America, and attacked health care and policies helping trans people.

Sherald’s work, meanwhile, uplifts the lives of everyday Black people. The viewpoint at trial, both politically and in Sherald’s art, is whose history and whose lives get to be considered American.

Robyn Palmore-Amos, who visited the High on the opening day of Sherald’s exhibit, said it felt as if the subjects could be her aunt, her uncle or her kids. Sherald’s restaging of “V-J Day in Times Square,” especially stood out to her. It was a reminder that Black men and women were just as much a part of the post-war period as white people were, she said.

“She’s portraying that we’re just as American as any other person who feels they’re American,” Palmore-Amos said. “We are American history. We have shaped the fabric of this country. There’s no part of America that doesn’t include Black people.”

The New Yorker and Vanity Fair have used Sherald’s portraits for their covers; the show includes a painting of Breonna Taylor that was specifically commissioned by Vanity Fair for its September 2020 cover. Days before the High’s opening, Sherald was at the Met Gala, where she was on the gala board, in an outfit referencing her own “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” of a young woman sipping from an outsized teacup. She has also been photographed for the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and was named one of Time’s 2026 Women of the Year.

But that mass popularity means that her work is often seen in reproduction, either through a screen or on a cover of a magazine, rather than in its physical, painted form.

Her style can seem simple and understated on paper or on a screen, but in person, the portraits are colossal, sometimes up to 10 feet tall. The grays of the skin are richer than they appear in print, with subtle shifts in tone and lightness. While her work brings out each subject’s interiority in their stance or setting, her mastery is especially seen in the details: the etching on a bamboo earring, the fold of a jeans cuff, the sheen of fresh lip gloss. And there is the feeling of each character’s eyes taking in the viewer, creating a question of who is perceiving who. That doesn’t mean the works feel sad, or haunting; instead, taken together, they feel like peeks into life.

That these figures and their lives stand within American history is a key part of the exhibit. Sherald’s “If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It,” featuring a lone man in a red beanie, nods to another famous photograph — “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” — of laborers eating lunch atop a steel beam. The titles, too: “American Grit,” of a boxer with no legs; the play on words of “Trans Forming Liberty”; even the exhibit title “American Sublime.”

That title had been bouncing around in Sherald’s head for years before the exhibition was even a thought, Roberts said. When she and the team were first putting the show together, they knew there would be an election in the fall of 2024, and the way the show would be perceived could change depending on the outcome. But the title, and the entire exhibition, highlights the beauty of being a Black American, Roberts said, and points to the possibility of a sublime future.

When the show opened in San Francisco the week following Donald Trump’s win, some visitors wept at the sight of Sherald’s towering portraits. As Trump’s first months back in office unfolded, encountering Sherald’s paintings began to feel “like a balm,” Roberts said.

Revisiting the works now, Roberts said they feel like “a bulwark against a difficult time.”

The Atlanta stop brings Sherald’s work back to the state where she was born and the city where she went to college. Jennifer Freeman Marshall visited the High’s exhibit on opening day with her daughter, a student at Spelman College a few miles away, her brother and their 82-year-old mother, who was rolled along in a wheelchair. As they moved through the works, Freeman Marshall admired Sherald’s “commitment to telling a story about the Black experience here in the United States.”

“It’s a narrative that’s as diverse as we are,” she said. She and her family could point to certain images and name the side of the family the subjects remind them of, she said, making the entire collection feel “very intimate.”

There is a tension between what Sherald imagines and what happens outside the walls of the exhibit. Her portrait of Taylor is situated between two other portraits of Black women, making the trio appear almost like a friend group. Nearby, Obama gazes on, and across from them is “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).” In this room, these women are peers. Outside of it, one of them is dead.

One painting, an earlier piece from 2009, cuts to this question. Titled “They Call Me Redbone, but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake,” a young girl in a yellow sundress printed with strawberries cocks her head to the viewer. How we are perceived is often not up to us, the painting declares.

Can artists paint a way to a different future? Part of Sherald’s goal is to create “images that she wants to see in the world,” said Angelica Arbelaez, who curated the show for the High.

“The images that she has seen in her life have changed the world, whether they’ve affirmed or distorted a certain kind of idea,” Arbelaez said. “She understands that images have the power to do that, and in her body of work, she is actually enacting that change.”

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