“A white man was about to paint over Philando [Castile]’s memory, which had painted over ‘Black Lives Matter,’ which had painted over who knows how many other words of protest in the space where a white supremacist formerly stood.... I realized his life wasn’t being erased as much as the story of America was being revised.”
—Irvin Weathersby Jr., In Open Contempt
On entering the first gallery of Amy Sherald’s American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view through August 10, what first strikes me is the expansive arrangement of five portraits along a curving white wall. This doesn’t feel like a museum, but like the ambulatory of a cathedral. Each portrait of a chic Black figure stands apart, afforded its own clearing. Passing them slowly from right to left is like processing through a shrine, recalling the mosaic apse of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna, with its four bishops as human hinges between heaven and earth, or the statues tucked into the outer niches of the Orsanmichele church in Florence. Even the discreet placement of the Whitney’s wall labels—far off to the left—encourages an unmediated encounter between viewer and subject, letting Sherald’s portraits speak for themselves as sacred interventions—monuments to individual lives, infused with joy and mourning.
Sherald’s first major survey, which premiered last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, arrives in a period of public iconoclasm and in the aftermath of a particularly violent stretch of American history. From 2012 to 2020, Black people were repeatedly desecrated by state and vigilante forces; images of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and others circulated widely. Elizabeth Alexander named the young Black Americans who came of age during this period the Trayvon Generation, after Trayvon Martin, who was killed at seventeen by a civilian who wanted to be a policeman in Florida. The egregious death of Sonya Massey at the hands of a police officer in 2024 suggests that this period is not over. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken new aim at Black histories, targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington; the museum’s former director, Kevin Young, left his position last month.
Sherald’s iconic portraits reverse these physical and symbolic erasures. Many of her compositions are deceptively simple. They often feature a single figure staged against a sparse background. Monumentality arises not through scale alone—most of Sherald’s paintings are human-sized and some are significantly larger—but through atmosphere, the attention paid to each subject’s posture, attire, and expression. My favorite is A Midsummer Afternoon Dream (2021). With its gray-blue sky and late-summer melancholy, it channels the eerie serenity of the work of Hughie Lee-Smith, the twentieth-century painter whose figures often occupy barren or uncertain landscapes. (Lee-Smith, like Sherald, took the moody realism of Edward Hopper and fringed it with surrealist touches.)
In both artists’ work, solitary figures are marooned in scenes that are neither wholly real nor entirely dreamlike. Midsummer’s windswept grass and backdrop—a picket fence and an almost-too-perfect white house in the distance—recall Lee-Smith’s habit of inserting sharp architectural elements into otherwise desolate or flattened spaces nearly drained of temporal specificity. The effect is to create landscapes of interiority—worlds that feel like projections of the subject’s emotional register.
Where Sherald departs, though, is in palette and texture: her brighter hues (the sunflower yellow, the pops of fuchsia, the subject’s sky-blue dress) don’t negate the solitude of her figure but amplify it. She paints contentment and containment in the same key, refusing to resolve the scene into clarity or closure. Lee-Smith created a visual language of metaphysical dislocation; here Sherald extends it into a new register of Black feminine self-possession. Except for her dog, the woman in Midsummer is alone; she might just be resting, breathing in the smell of the air before it rains, momentarily enjoying a sensation for which there isn’t quite a word.
Sherald’s engagement with the sacred is deliberate, a humane response to an age that seems intent on denying human dignity. Her Mother and Child (2016) builds on the long practice of Black artists riffing on Marian iconography. The Black nationalist and artist Glanton Dowdell resurrected the motif as a countercultural symbol in the 1960s for the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a Pan-African Orthodox Christian church in Detroit. Since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement around 2013, other contemporary artists like Titus Kaphar, Mark Doox, Kate Egawa, and Oasa DuVerney have all incorporated Virgin and Child imagery into their work, often as meditations on the mortality of Black women and their children, usually their sons. Sherald’s version is perhaps most directly in conversation with the late Elizabeth Catlett’s unsentimental Madonna II (1991) linocut. These children—girls, it seems—are not playful Raphaelite cherubs, but are instead preternaturally perceptive, plainly dressed, and awed, if not frightened, by their mother’s Byzantine solemnity. In these paintings, the sacred is not elevated above the world but embedded in its earthiest tones, its squinting, sun- and sweat-drenched laborers.
The guardedness of some of Sherald’s subjects is especially apparent in Saint Woman (2015), one of a handful of portraits in the exhibition whose subject does not meet the viewer’s gaze. In this, Sherald stages a quiet act of deflection. The figure’s golden backdrop echoes Barkley L. Hendricks’s Lawdy Mama (1969), whose subject, surrounded by a gilded halo, blends streetwise cool with iconographic elevation. Sherald deepens the withholding by having her figure look away. The unnamed saint clasps her arm across her body in a gesture of physical self-restraint—a posture that Sherald returns to in works such as There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart (2019) and Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself (2015), a work not featured in this show. If Saint Woman’s gilded background invites us to read her as sanctified, the saint’s expression and body language say otherwise: this is not an icon of serenity or revelation, but one of guarded sovereignty. The neutral or ambiguous expressions of Sherald’s subjects—amused, suspicious, distant—suggest an inner life unfolding on a quantum timeline, a layered temporality in which past, present, and imagined futures overlap without resolution.
It’s worth reflecting on Sherald’s unusual use of color. Her subjects’ skin is rendered not in black or brown but grisaille—a palette of grayscale tones—while their clothes, jewelry, and backdrops burst with color. While the use of grisaille is regularly identified as part of Sherald’s signature aesthetic, she is not the only contemporary Black artist to employ it; the Ghanaian artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe also uses it to great effect. But in Sherald’s work, the contrast creates a dual layering, a split within the painting itself. It is a visual separation that feels temporal as much as aesthetic.
That temporal strangeness is heightened in the idiosyncratic backgrounds of many Sherald paintings, particularly those from about 2008 to 2017. These are not empty so much as alive with granular, cloudlike textures—patterns that resemble the veining of marble, or the stippling of histological slides under a microscope. The backgrounds feel organic, cellular, suggesting that these figures are not suspended in abstract space but form part of a living substrate. There is a sense that what we are seeing is not a set of staged poses but cross-sections of interior life itself.
The oil-on-water effect of Sherald’s contrasts—subjects floating against mottled fields, expressions resistant to their colorful trappings—is crucial. The subjects are neither wholly absorbed by their environments nor entirely divorced from them. They exist at the threshold between visibility and privacy, recognition and mystery. This tension—the palpable distance between the expressions of her subjects and the expressiveness of what adorns and sometimes surrounds them—gives Sherald’s work its enthralling power. You sense that her subjects might gain their full color only elsewhere, away from the act of depiction, away from the viewer’s desire to see every part of them clearly. While some of Sherald’s figures appear relaxed, even bashful, others seem newly apprehended (and apprehensive), caught in the moment when they realize they are being seen.
On March 27, 2025, two weeks before American Sublime opened in New York, Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order claimed that “Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” It described the “historical revision” of stories about the nation’s pursuit of liberty, individual rights, and happiness—a not-so-veiled reference to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project—as “irredeemably flawed.” The order also articulated an artistic vision and direction for the United States as we approach the country’s 250th anniversary: “Solemn and uplifting public monuments” including memorials, statues, and other markers will supposedly fill Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia by July 4, 2026.
This state-sponsored memory work campaign is an attempt to reconsecrate “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people,” so the order goes. Curiously, it also calls attention to “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape,” though few administrations have done more to threaten its preservation. Perhaps the order’s drafters have in mind something like the paintings of the Hudson River School, their own American sublime. As art historians like Angela Miller and Alan Wallach have argued, the Hudson River School’s Romantic visions of the American landscape functioned less as documents of place than as fantasies of innocence, promoting mythic visions of unblemished land while excluding the human histories of Indigenous dispossession and Black bondage that shaped it.
The urge to monumentalize—to preserve meaning through representation—is one of the defining drives of American culture wars today. Sherald’s paintings participate in that struggle, their creation contemporaneous with the toppling of Confederate monuments and a renewed emphasis on Black people’s need to carve out spaces for rest, meditation, and other pleasures that protect both body and mind. Sherald’s work exists in close relation to the world that the Black Lives Matter movement helped usher in; it is one vital node within a broader aesthetic movement to expand the visual and affective vocabularies of Blackness, advanced by portraitists and photographers such as Jordan Casteel, Henry Taylor, Jennifer Packer, Tyler Mitchell, and Nina Chanel Abney. This movement is about more than aesthetics: constructing scenes of Black interiority, imagination, and repose is meant to bring about a new world and a new status quo, one predicated as much on self-care and self-protection as political confrontation.
Sherald’s 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, the National Portrait Gallery commission that made the artist internationally famous, is a red herring in her oeuvre. More often for Sherald, to depict Black people is to honor their mundane experiences and resist the desecrations of the past and present—the myriad threats against African American histories, spaces, artifacts, and individuals.
This is why placing Michelle Obama’s portrait in its own alcove within the gallery, positioned on an otherwise unoccupied expanse of wall, created the exhibition’s most glaring emotional dead zone. I did not realize until I saw it there how much I had been hoping for a different, less corny curatorial choice. The exhibition didn’t need a spatially demarcated shrine because all of Sherald’s portraits serve that function. Part of the thrill of encountering Saint Woman at the show’s entrance depends on her not being alone; the canvas is the subject’s sanctum, and she is looking over her shoulder toward the other portraits. She is in a room full of people just like her.
Sherald, who has intentionally set out to replace “the imagery that we see,” is not one to take a reflection for granted. She is slightly less interested in holding up mirrors than in painting subjects who might be holding up cameras of their own, inspecting the watcher, like the woman in What’s different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth (2017). Although the painting does not depict Sherald, it is perhaps the closest thing to a self-portrait she has done. Peter Schjeldahl, writing for The New Yorker in 2019, called this “the Sherald Effect: an experience of looking that entails being looked at, to ambiguous but inescapably gripping ends.”
In an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sherald once spoke of the power of photography and preservation. She thinks extensively about photography when she paints, in large part because she uses pictures of her models as a kind of sketchbook. She told Coates that she has taken many photographs of her mother, Geraldine, and has decided to wait until she dies to paint her. What do we call these pictures Sherald keeps of her mother? Not quite promissory notes, though they contain traces of the future in them. Coates called this gesture “a reverse will”—not a giving away, but a holding back, an act of remembrance composed in advance, saving the image for a future mourning.
Among all the portraits in American Sublime, few carry as great an emotional and commemorative weight as Sherald’s painting of Breonna Taylor. Coates originally commissioned Sherald to paint it for the cover of Vanity Fair in the summer of 2020, months after Taylor was killed during a late-night raid on her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. In this work, Sherald’s project is at its most explicitly sacred. The painting is a kind of Lazarus moment, reviving the dignity of a stolen life. The subtle details of Taylor’s portrait—the cross necklace testifying to her faith, her small hoop earring, the engagement ring she was never able to receive from her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker—kept me in front of the painting. These are not grandiose embellishments but intimate signs, tokens of a life lived in its particularity.
Standing before Breonna Taylor, I understood that I was staring at a cenotaph, a memorial built for someone whose body lies elsewhere. I had seen the image many times, but it hadn’t affected me as viscerally as when I stood before it, looking into the empty tomb. The portrait is a kind of visual synecdoche, capturing not only Taylor’s likeness but also reminding us of countless other young Black lives lost to police violence, lives whose absence underlies the show’s insistence on presence, individuality, and peace.
But Sherald’s portrait doesn’t remain in the register of grief. It performs the same quantum work as the rest of the show: folding timelines, bending possibilities. Taylor is not just remembered here—she is resituated among the living, rendered with the same idealizing anonymity as Sherald’s other subjects. The painting doesn’t ask only that we mourn her; it asks that we imagine a world in which she still lives, not as a symbol, but as someone who might be waiting just beyond the edge of the canvas with her whole life intact.
