Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Amy Sherald’s new exhibition, American Sublime, opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in April 2025.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Member Previews: Apr 3–7, 2025
Apr 9–Aug 10, 2025

Key Takeaways:

  • Amy Sherald’s new exhibitionAmerican Sublime, opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in April 2025.
  • It includes her most recognized works—such as the Michelle Obama portrait—alongside lesser-known and newly commissioned pieces.
  • The exhibit explores Black American identityeveryday heroism, and the tradition of portraiture reimagined through a contemporary lens.
  • Runs through August 2025 at the Whitney in New York City.

🖼️ About American Sublime

Amy Sherald’s American Sublime at the Whitney Museum is a comprehensive look at the artist’s groundbreaking career as one of the most influential portrait painters working today. Known for her stylized realismgray skin tones, and use of vibrant, color-blocked backgrounds, Sherald redefines how Black subjects are seen in American art history.

The exhibition traces Sherald’s work from her early paintings to her most recent creations, offering a cohesive look at how she centers dignity, individuality, and quiet strength in her subjects.


🎨 What’s on Display?

The exhibition includes:

  • Her iconic portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama (on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery)
  • A new body of work reflecting on Black joy, leisure, and everyday moments
  • Earlier student work and rarely seen pieces from her Baltimore studio years
  • Video interviews and behind-the-scenes process footage

Each portrait invites viewers to engage deeply—not just with the image, but with the subject’s presence, clothing, and gaze.


🎟️ Exhibit Info

  • Exhibition Title: Amy Sherald: American Sublime
  • Location: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
  • Dates: April 5 – August 31, 2025
  • Tickets: Included with general admission | More info at whitney.org
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
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.