Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Whitney Museum of American Art
April 9th through August 10th, 2025
The moment has arrived: Amy Sherald, the celebrated American painter known for reframing portraiture through a lens of quiet power and radical visibility, will debut her first New York museum solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art on April 9th, 2025. Titled American Sublime, the show is a sweeping, career-defining survey featuring nearly fifty works that chart Sherald’s singular visual language and cultural impact.
Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1973, Amy Sherald grew up attuned to the nuances of representation long before she ever picked up a brush. A childhood fascination with family photo albums—and particularly a black-and-white portrait of her grandmother—sparked an early interest in how Black life could be seen, remembered, and reimagined.
Sherald earned her BA in painting from Clark Atlanta University and went on to receive an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her artistic breakthrough came not through the traditional gallery circuit but through intention, perseverance, and a deep-seated desire to shift cultural narratives.
For longtime admirers, this is a milestone that feels both overdue and perfectly timed. Sherald’s paintings—cool-toned, composed, and unmistakably hers—center Black Americans in scenes of everyday intimacy and resilience. From her poetic early portraits to her monumental commissions of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, Sherald’s work invites viewers to witness not just the individual sitter, but the shape of American identity itself.
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated at the Whitney by Rujeko Hockley with David Lisbon, American Sublime spans Sherald’s practice from 2007 to today. It includes never-before-seen early works, new paintings created specifically for the exhibition, and a powerful array of portraits that speak volumes in their stillness. Throughout, Sherald positions herself in dialogue with American realists like Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Andrew Wyeth—artists also represented in the Whitney’s collection—while simultaneously rewriting who gets to be seen in that tradition.
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.
Each canvas reflects Sherald’s fascination with photography, memory, and the complexity of identity. Her signature grayscale skin tones purposefully shift the gaze away from racial categorization and toward the interiority of her subjects. “American Sublime is a salve,” Sherald says. “A call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.”
That insistence reaches beyond the gallery walls. As part of the exhibition, Sherald is also unveiling a new public installation, Four Ways of Being, across from the museum’s Horatio Street building. Featuring four larger-than-life portraits—some never before shown in New York—the work speaks to presence, possibility, and the multitudes that exist in the everyday.
For Whitney director Scott Rothkopf, the exhibition reflects Sherald’s rightful place in the canon: “Few contemporary artists make images as gripping and indelible.” Her influence has shaped a new generation of portraiture, one where cultural visibility and quiet defiance can live in the same frame.
A fully illustrated monograph, co-published by SFMOMA and Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition, with contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Dario Calmese, Rhea Combs, and Deborah Willis. And for those hoping to experience Sherald’s world firsthand, tickets are available now at whitney.org.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is on view at the Whitney from April 9th through August 10th, 2025. The exhibition is a defining moment for an artist who has already shifted the American gaze—and whose work, in her own words, insists that “images can change the world.”
