Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Whitney Museum, New York
From April 9th until August, 2025
This spring, The Whitney Museum of American Art will present Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the artist’s debut solo exhibition at a New York museum. With many accolades and awards to her name, she was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and in 2018 was selected by First Lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the same gallery. Now, she’s back with her most comprehensive display work, bringing together almost fifty paintings that span her career, from 2007 to the present. This exhibition positions Sherald within the art historical tradition of American realism and figuration, as we explore her career, signature portrait style, and depictions of American life. In her paintings, she privileges Black Americans as her subjects, depicting everyday people and foregrounding a population often unseen or underrepresented in art history.
opening image: Amy Sherald, Four Ways of Being, 2024.
“American Sublime is a salve. A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.”
The exhibition features early works, never or rarely seen by the public, and new work created specifically for the exhibition, along with iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—two of the most recognisable and significant paintings made by an American artist in recent years. “It is a great honour to work with Amy Sherald, one of the most compelling, generous, and impactful artists of our time. Her unwavering dedication and commitment to what she has called the wonder of what it is to be a Black American is deeply felt, and I am thrilled to share her visionary work with our audiences,” says Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Profoundly committed to expanding and enriching the notions of American identity, she focuses on her subjects, inviting the viewer to meet them eye to eye, and to step in the imagined world. She employs a host of props and iconography, it may be a beach ball, the American flag, or a toy pony, crafting relatable narratives and highlighting shared life experiences. By including symbols that resonate with common ideas of American identity and history, these portraits show the complexity of 21st century American life, and the body of work displays the multiple facets of American identity, reinforcing Sherald’s belief that images can change the world.
