Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Through Aug 10

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This image is a portrait of Michelle Obama seated, resting her chin on her hand. She is wearing a long, geometric-patterned dress that features bold black, white, red, pink and yellow shapes, including stripes, triangles, and circles. The dress covers much of the lower half of the image. The background is a soft, solid light blue and her hair is styled in loose waves. Her expression is calm yet contemplative.
This image is a portrait of Michelle Obama seated, resting her chin on her hand. She is wearing a long, geometric-patterned dress that features bold black, white, red, pink and yellow shapes, including stripes, triangles, and circles. The dress covers much of the lower half of the image. The background is a soft, solid light blue and her hair is styled in loose waves. Her expression is calm yet contemplative.

Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Oil on linen, 72 1/8  × 60 1/8 × 2.5 in. (183.1 × 152.718 × 6.3 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

On view
Floor 5

Open: Apr 9–Aug 10, 2025

This exhibition includes a billboard across from the Museum’s entrance on Gansevoort Street.

Amy Sherald is a storyteller. She creates precisely crafted narratives of American life, selecting, styling, and photographing her sitters as the foundation for her nuanced paintings. Thus, while Sherald (b. 1973; Columbus, Georgia) bases her works on specific people, they are more than traditional portraits. They center everyday Black Americans, compelling in their individuality and extraordinary in their ordinariness, inviting viewers to step into Sherald’s imagined worlds. In this exhibition, paintings of such ordinary Americans join her iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and, heartbreakingly, Breonna Taylor, to produce a resonant ode to the multiplicity and complexity of American identity. 

Sherald also makes the images she wants to see in the world. Although she considers herself an inheritor of the American Realist tradition of artists such as Edward Hopper—a genre that was central to the Whitney’s origins nearly a century ago—those artists focused on the lives of everyday white Americans. Instead, Sherald privileges a population that has historically been omitted from art history and wider visual representation. By doing so, she challenges us to think more broadly about American Realism, suggesting an additional lineage for it: one born from the art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where she first trained as an artist, and one that includes such underrecognized figures as William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Laura Wheeler Waring, among others. 

Across Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Sherald’s contemplative subjects appear most concerned with their own interiority, prioritizing their own peace and self-realization over how others might perceive them and the shackles of history, though they are inevitably impacted by both. Her audacious project highlights what she has called the “wonder of what it is to be a Black American,” rendering a rich and unconstrained Black world in vibrant Technicolor.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition is curated by Sarah Roberts, former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. The presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art is organized by Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator with David Lisbon, curatorial assistant.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is sponsored by

 

Major support is provided by 


Major support is also provided by Judy Hart Angelo, Nancy and Steve Crown, Agnes Gund, Hauser & Wirth, the Kapadia Equity Fund, The KHR McNeely Family Foundation | Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, Nancy and Fred Poses, and Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer and Rob Speyer.

Significant support is provided by Marcia Dunn and Jonathan Sobel, The Holly Peterson Foundation, and Dana Su Lee.

Generous support is provided by Sarah Arison, Alexandre and Lori Chemla, John and Amy Griffin Foundation, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, Deepah Kumaraiah and Sean Dempsey, McCallum Family, Jonathan M. Rozoff, Todd White and Cameron Carani, and an anonymous donor.

Additional support is provided by Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Sheree and Jerry Friedman, Barbara and Michael Gamson, the Girlfriend Fund, Alice and Manu Sareen, Barbara Karp Shuster, and George Wells and Manfred Rantner.

New York magazine is the exclusive media sponsor.

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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