(CNN) — Diana Beasley wanted to spend her 12th birthday surrounded by Amy Sherald’s paintings at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
She dressed up for the occasion, wearing a sparkly pink crown that read “BIRTHDAY GIRL” over her neat braids. Princess Diana met Sherald at school and said she liked how her art was “realistic but also a bit cartoonish.”
Sherald’s favorite work is the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. In this photo, as in most of Sherald’s portraits, the subject is looking directly at the viewer. Her skin is rendered in gray, the artist’s signature style, rather than a naturalistic brown, and she is dressed in a bright black and white dress with multicolored geometric details and a soft light blue background. Princess Diana said President Obama seemed “serious about his job.”
The portrait of Michelle Obama, displayed in front of two benches for attendees to sit and gaze at her, is one of the highlights of the “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” exhibition, which arrived in Atlanta this month as the final leg of a 17-month national tour. When the painting was unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2018 alongside Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Barack Obama, it seemed to signal that Sherald had been enshrined in a new official institution that unchallengedly acknowledges that black images and black perspectives are part of the canon.
Eight years later, Sherald’s work travels through different cultural landscapes. “American Sublime” was supposed to bring Sherald back to the National Portrait Gallery last year after spending several months on tour at the Whitney Museum in New York. Sherald later learned that the federally funded agency wanted to accompany her painting “Trans Forming Liberty,” which depicts a black transgender woman in the position of the Statue of Liberty, with a video of people reacting to the work. In the words of the Smithsonian Institution, “to contextualize the work.”
Instead, Sherald pulled the entire exhibit and sent it instead to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the Trump administration declared “Transforming Liberty” a “fundamental deviation from the mission and spirit of our nation’s national museums.”
Inevitably, therefore, Sherald’s mid-career retrospective doubles as a reflection on the crisis in artistic expression in this country.
Sarah Roberts, who curated “American Sublime” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that two years ago her work felt celebratory with its mundane subject matter. Shortly before the exhibition’s debut, SFMOMA purchased Sherald’s “For Love and Country” painting, which depicts two black men kissing while wearing sailor caps, a recreation of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “VJ Day in Times Square” photo of a sailor kissing a nurse, as a tribute to the influence of the LGBTQ community in San Francisco.
But representation has become an act of rebellion as federal and state governments restrict LGBTQ rights.
“It feels more like a commitment,” Roberts said. “As if to reassert no, in fact, this is the America that exists in this museum, in this city, and we’re not going to let that go.”
The show was a big hit in Baltimore, becoming the BMA’s most popular exhibit of the 21st century, drawing more than 80,000 viewers to the museum. (The second most popular exhibit at the museum since 2000 was the 2016-2017 “Matisse/Diebenkorn” exhibition, which attracted 46,000 visitors.)
Sherald’s popularity is due in part to her ability to capture a vision of the United States that differs from the one promoted by the federal government. In his second term, President Donald Trump has posted racist images on social media, crushed research and efforts that help minorities, welcomed white South African refugees but banned other African and Latin American refugees, and attacked health care and policies that support transgender people.
Meanwhile, Sherald’s work uplifts the everyday lives of Black people. The focus of the trial, both politically and in Sherald’s art, is whose history and life counts as American.
Robin Palmore-Amos, who visited High on the opening day of the Sherald exhibit, said she felt as if the subjects were her aunt, uncle or children. Sherald’s retelling of “VJ Day in Times Square” particularly caught her eye. It reminded her that black men and women were just as much a part of the postwar era as white people, she said.
“She portrays us as Americans just like other people who feel they are Americans,” Palmore-Amos said. “We are American history. We have shaped the fabric of this country. There is no part of America without black people.”
The New Yorker and Vanity Fair used Sherald’s portrait on their covers. The show includes a painting of Breonna Taylor that was specifically commissioned by Vanity Fair for its September 2020 cover. A few days before High’s opening, Sherald attended the Met Gala and appeared on the gala board wearing an outfit inspired by her work, “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” which features a young woman drinking from an oversized teacup. She was also photographed on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and was named one of Time magazine’s 2026 Women of the Year.
However, her mass popularity means that her work is often seen as reproductions through screens and magazine covers, rather than in its actual depicted form.
Her style may seem simple and understated on paper or screen, but in person, her portraits are gigantic, sometimes reaching 10 feet tall. The skin grays are richer than they appear in print, with subtle variations in tone and brightness. Her work brings out the interiority of each subject’s stance and setting, but her mastery is especially evident in the details, such as the etching of a bamboo earring, the folds of a jeans cuff, or the sheen of a fresh lip gloss. And there’s a sense that each character’s eyes are taking in the viewer, raising questions about who is recognizing whom. That doesn’t mean the work is sad or forgettable. In fact, seeing them together feels like a peek into life.
The presence of these individuals and their lives in American history is an important part of the exhibit. Sherald’s “If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It,” featuring a lone man in a red beanie, is a nod to another famous photo of workers eating lunch on a steel beam, “Lunch a Top a Skyscraper.” The title is “American Grit,” about a boxer without legs. A play on the words “Transforming Liberty.” The exhibition title is “American Sublime.”
Roberts said the title had been bouncing around in Sherald’s head for years, even before she thought about the exhibition. When she and her team were first developing the show, they knew there would be an election in the fall of 2024, and the outcome could change how the show was perceived. But the title, and the exhibition as a whole, emphasizes the beauty of being a Black American and suggests the possibility of a noble future, Roberts said.
When the show opened in San Francisco the week after Donald Trump’s victory, some visitors wept at the sight of Sherald’s towering portrait. As the first few months of Trump’s return to office passed, encountering Sherald’s paintings began to feel “like a sedative,” Roberts said.
Roberts said that when he looks back at his works now, they feel like “a bulwark against difficult times.”
The Atlanta stop brings Ms. Sherald’s work back to the state where she was born and the city where she attended college. Jennifer Freeman Marshall visited the high school exhibit on the first day with her daughter, a student at Spelman College a few miles away, her brother, and her 82-year-old mother, who was transported in a wheelchair. As they progressed through the work, Freeman Marshall praised Sherald’s “commitment to telling a story about the black experience here in the United States.”
“It’s a story as diverse as we are,” she said. She and her family can point to specific images and name aspects of their family that the subject reminds them of, making the entire collection feel “very intimate,” she said.
There is a tension between Sherald’s imagination and what is happening outside the walls of the exhibition. Her portrait of Taylor sits between two other portraits of black women, making the trio look like a group of friends. President Obama looks on nearby, and across from him is “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).” In this room, these women are allies. One of them is dead outside.
One painting, an early work from 2009, cuts into this question. Titled “They Call Me Redbone, But I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake,” a young girl in a yellow sundress with strawberries printed on it tilts her head at the viewer. This painting declares that how we are perceived is often not up to us.
Can artists chart a path to a different future? Part of Sheraldo’s goal is to create “the images that she wants to see around the world,” said Angelica Arbelaez, who curated The High’s show.
“The images she has seen throughout her life have changed the world, whether they have confirmed certain ideas or distorted them,” Alverez said. “She understands that images have the power to make that happen, and she really makes that change happen in her body of work.”
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