When Amy Sherald stepped off the elevator at the Whitney Museum in 2007, she was just another struggling artist making the pilgrimage from Baltimore with a dream. She’d been waitressing for a decade, working out of a cramped studio, manifesting a moment that seemed impossibly distant. What she probably didn’t know was that she was standing in the exact spot where, eighteen years later, visitors would encounter five of her earliest paintings, the opening salvo of her first major museum survey.
This is the Amy Sherald story that American Sublime tells, and it’s far more complex than the overnight sensation narrative that began with Michelle Obama’s portrait. “She has been a working artist for 25 years,” curator Rujeko Hockley emphasized during the exhibition’s press preview, pushing back against the idea that Sherald emerged fully formed in 2018. “She is a person who really lived the life of an artist in the sense of she pursued her dreams at the expense of all other things.”
The Evolution of Vision
The exhibition’s chronological arrangement reveals an artist in constant dialogue with herself, working through what would become her distinctive visual language. Those early works from her Baltimore period (all the same size because that’s what her small studio could accommodate) show Sherald transitioning from mottled backgrounds to the saturated dreamscapes we know today.
The earliest painting in the show, “Hangman” from 2007, represents a pivotal moment. As Hockley notes, it’s “the closest allusion to the kind of history of racial violence in the United States that Amy is interested in and invested in,” while simultaneously insisting that trauma is only “one facet of any person’s identity.” This painting hadn’t been seen since 2007. Sherald herself wasn’t sure about including it, but it bridges her journey from artist struggling with representation to master of what Hockley calls “portraiture plus.”
The Inheritance Project
What emerges most powerfully from Sherald’s body of work is her deliberate expansion of American Realism’s DNA. While she positions herself within the tradition of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth (artists central to the Whitney’s origins) she’s simultaneously exposing a glaring absence. “There is an evident absence of Black Americans in these representations,” the press materials acknowledge with characteristic understatement.
Sherald’s solution isn’t simply inclusion. It’s reimagining the entire framework. She draws from “the art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities” where she trained, creating an alternative lineage that includes “underrecognized figures as William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Laura Wheeler Waring.” It’s a profound act of institutional memory, creating the images she “wants to see in the world.”
Her subjects, styled and photographed with meticulous care, exist in what she calls an “imaginative space.” They’re portraits, but they’re also something more expansive. Her signature gray skin tones aren’t about erasing race but about expanding possibilities, “demonstrating that there is more to an individual than can be contained in a single image or facet of their identity.”
The Wonder of Being
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Sherald’s practice is her selection process. Except for the Obama and Breonna Taylor commissions, she chooses her subjects based on what she calls their “ineffable spark”: qualities like poise, style, or wit that can’t be reduced to demographic categories. During photoshoots, she allows models to pose organically, building synergy until she can “authentically capture their essence.”
This approach yields paintings that feel both timeless and urgently contemporary. Her subjects appear “most concerned with their own interiority, prioritizing their own peace and self-realization over how others might perceive them,” according to the exhibition materials. It’s a radical proposition: Black Americans depicted not in struggle or striving, but simply existing.
The new works created for this tour push even further. “Transforming Liberty,” a monumental painting addressing restrictions against trans and gender non-conforming Americans, expands her central question: “who is an American, who gets to be depicted, and how are they depicted?” The massive triptych “Ekklesia” represents what Hockley sees as the culmination of Sherald’s interests: complex, mysterious, rooted in reality but existing in pure imagination.
The Manifestation
Standing before these works at the Whitney, it’s impossible not to think about that 2007 visit when Sherald manifested this very exhibition. Her faith in her own vision, maintained through years of waitressing and small studios, feels like its own form of American sublime. She believed in images’ power to “change the world” long before the world was ready to listen.
“American Sublime is a salve,” Sherald says of the exhibition. “A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.” After 25 years of insisting, she’s finally impossible to ignore.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime runs through August 10, 2025, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Long Game: Amy Sherald’s 25-Year Journey to American Sublime