Amy Sherald
American Sublime
Amy Sherald
SFMOMA
Ongoing – March 9
“I really have this deep belief that images can change the world.” – Amy Sherald.
I can only hope so!
Amy Sherald portrait; photo: Olivia Lifungula
Amy Sherald invites you to breathe. Come and be taken in by the colors, shapes, and forms painted by one of America’s defining contemporary portraitists. This exhibition presents nearly 50 of Amy Sherald’s luminous paintings, including her iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, poetic early works, and new works on view for the first time.
LEFT – For the painting, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, Sherald had steel girders constructed to recreate the essence of Charles C. Ebbets’s photograph, Lunch atop a Skyscraper (1932), an image of steel workers taking a break on a construction site high above Manhattan. Sherald’s work points to the greatness of American industry, but also the Black workers whose contributions to these advancements have been largely erased from history.
RIGHT – The painting For Love, and for Country, which directly references Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 black-and-white photograph of a sailor enthusiastically kissing a nurse in Times Square. Sherald’s ten-foot-tall work envisions the joyful embrace happening between two men, her rebuttal of the rising discrimination and restrictive legislation against the LGBTQ+ community.
Portraiture
Sherald’s artworks convey the quiet power in everyday people and invite viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of American identity. In the spirit of great American artists like Edward Hopper, Alice Neel, and Kerry James Marshall, Sherald’s works reframe our understanding of American culture. Her method of selecting individuals she meets on the street and using facial expression, body language, and clothing choices to create paintings that transcend portraiture and expand the canon of American art.
Throughout her work, Sherald uses gray tones to depict her subjects’ skin, employing a painting technique that dates back to the early Renaissance, and encourages viewers to see their interior lives before the color of their skin. As she stated in Smithsonian Magazine, “A Black person on a canvas is automatically read as radical when you consider the history of portraiture and the role of picture making and portraits historically. In hindsight, I look back and I’m like, that’s why my figures are gray. I didn’t want the conversation to be marginalized, and I had a fear of that, early on. My figures needed to be pushed into the world in a universal way, where they could become a part of the mainstream art historical narrative. I knew I didn’t want it to be about identity alone.”
Don’t be surprised when you meet her portraits “head-on.” Though Sherald’s canvas sizes sometimes reach as high as 10 feet, she has worked frequently with a 54x43-inch canvas since early in her career. This consistent size creates an added intimacy. She always hangs them lower than is typical in a museum, so that viewers directly look into the faces of her subjects.
In their depiction of Black men, women, and children at ease, with few markers of place, time, or context beyond the clothes they wear, Sherald’s paintings address the historical omission of Black people in portraiture. A virtuoso at world-building on canvas, Sherald conveys the interior emotion of her subjects through the deft positioning of a hand or tilt of a face, the careful curation of clothes and color, and titles that point to underlying themes.
In all her paintings, the figure’s facial expression – particularly the gaze – is critical to establishing a sense of agency for each subject. Sherald said in a Smithsonian Magazine interview, “My portraits are quiet, but they’re not passive. When you consider the African American historical narrative and its ties to the gaze, a glance could result in punishment by lynching. I wanted my sitters to look out and meet your gaze, instead of being gazed upon. Essentially, that’s the beginning of selfhood, a consideration of self which is not reactionary to your environment.”
Although Sherald is perhaps best known for her portraits of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, most of her works defy the traditional definition of portraiture. She chooses individuals who, for her, embody a particular idea or narrative she wants to put forth in the world. She then develops a story within each work through the figure’s pose and facial expression, and the use of color, clothing, and titling, to arrive at a finished painting. Sherald uses photo shoots with models, complete with sets, props, and clothes she has carefully selected, to compose detailed photographs from which she paints.
She has described her works as offering a “resting place” to see Black figures simply being themselves. With this approach, Sherald has created a form of figurative painting that transcends portraiture, acknowledging racial identity and moving beyond it to highlight our shared humanity. In an interview for Art21, Sherald said, “It’s got to be about humanity first, and then everything else has to follow.”
As the Bajan (Barbadian) artist Sheena Rose, notes, depicting Black subjects in recreation is a radical act.
Thematic Representation
“American Sublime” is organized thematically, with each gallery presenting a crucial idea in her work and explaining her detailed approach to making paintings.
ICONIC AMERICA
Sherald’s works reference ideals and imagery historically associated with what it means to be American, with a goal of expanding debates about race and representation, while also draws on images from art history and pop culture.
The first gallery includes paintings with particularly American motifs – bathers enjoying a day at the beach, people watching a rocket launch, or a farmer on his tractor.
PRECIOUS FUTURES
Paintings in this gallery center the preciousness and vulnerability of Black children and youth.
MICHELLE OBAMA
Sherald’s iconic painting of former First Lady Michelle Obama is featured in an adjacent gallery. This portrait goes beyond the public portrayal and media narratives of Obama to offer a fuller picture of her as a person with great presence, style, wit, and gravitas.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
For her portrait of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old woman killed in a botched police raid by Louisville, Kentucky, law enforcement in 2020, Sherald wanted to depict Taylor as a typical girl next door full of vitality, and give her an ongoing positive presence in the world. True to her meticulous approach, Sherald sought just the right model and dress, then relied on a widely published selfie that Taylor took in a car to capture the young woman’s face and expression. The portrait is the centerpiece of this gallery, which will be surrounded by other works depicting vibrant young women.
PUBLIC LIFE AND PRIVATE SELF
The divide between one’s public self and private self, and the need to navigate between them, is a frequent theme in Sherald’s work, and is the focus of the next gallery. Sherald grew up in predominantly white Columbus, Georgia, where she was one of just a few Black children in the public school system. She then attended Clark Atlanta University, the oldest historically Black university (HBCU) in the South. Both were formative experiences that shaped her understanding of how identity can shift or be constrained by environment and perceptions.
The title of the work, from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, further feeds this narrative. “Sherald rarely starts out with a title,” Curator Sarah Roberts says. “She makes the painting then finds the title that expresses what she’s trying to convey. They often tell you a lot about what the idea is in the painting.”
Lines from works of fiction and poetry are frequent inspirations. Two other works on view, Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like, and Freeing herself was one thing, taking ownership of that freed self was another, draw directly from Toni Morrison’s book Beloved. To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes, also included, references the poem Legacy by Aileen Cassinetto.
SELF-AFFIRMATION
The last gallery features paintings of people physically and spiritually comfortable in their self-hood. The title for Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own, the anchor work in this section, comes from Lucille Clifton’s poem, what the mirror said. The speaker says this affirmation before a mirror; the woman in Sherald’s work, composed in demeanor in a striking black-and-white dress and broad-brimmed hat, conceptually embodies this scene and sentiment.
In a 2018 article in Bmore Art, writer Kerr Houston notes the influence of sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois on Sherald. Du Bois described the Black American experience as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The subjects in this gallery refuse that dual sense of self and embody strength and self-possession.
New Works
The exhibition also will include new works made specifically for debut in San Francisco. With these works, including her first triptych Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons), Sherald continues pushing into new territory, introducing complex narratives among groups of figures and building on her impulse to expand representation of previously marginalized groups in American figure painting.
“I hope people will feel the transformative power of these paintings,” says Roberts. “These works are very accessible and very ambitious in what they ask us to do as a viewer, to probe any preconceptions we carry into the experience of standing in front of these paintings, to examine the thoughts and emotions they bring up for us, to consider how we think about beauty.”
“American Sublime” is the artist’s first mid-career survey and first major museum exhibition. The presentation features 50 works from 2007 to 2024. After its run at SFMOMA, the exhibition travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
For more information about this installation, click here.
WHILE YOU ARE THERE
There are many exhibitions to enjoy at SFMOMA. However, there are a few that will be moving on soon, so take some time to visit these notable works:
Yayoi Kusama: Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love
Ongoing – Fall 2025
When SFMOMA presented Kusama’s dual infinity rooms, the installation was rewarded with sell-out crowds. While only one-half of the installation remains (the other moved on to Ontario?), the single room remains a spectacular experience. [The remaining room is the one where Kusama is not reciting Japanese poetry.]
At first, the exterior of this sculptural work blends into the gallery’s all-white surroundings, punctuated by an array of large transparent acrylic dots, including a quadrant—or quarter-dot—door at one corner for visitors to enter. In the interior, bright ambient light filters through the colored windows to create a luminous pattern of overlapping circles. As visitors turn around in the space, the mirrored surfaces create an environment that is constantly in flux.
The installation can be disorienting. Visitors should not plan to spend more than four minutes inside the room. For information about sensory considerations, click here.
Kara E-Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
Ongoing – Spring 2026
Kara Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. Her work leverages expressions of fantasy and humor to confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, repossessing control in the process. Inspired by a wide range of sources, from antique dolls to Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Walker’s commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), considers the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society. Here, automatons trapped in a never-ending cycle of ritual and struggle are repositories of the human soul. They recall mechanized medieval icons that evidenced divinity, vitality, and the promise of faith. Situated within an energetically charged field of black obsidian from Mt. Konocti in Lake County — a volcanic glass with deep spiritual properties — Walker’s Gardeners evoke wonder, reflection, respite, and hope.
Just past this prophetic vignette, the installation’s namesake, Fortuna, responds to each visitor with a choreographed gesture and a printed fortune fresh from her mouth — an offering of absolution and contemplation. Do not tempt The Fates! Make sure to obtain your Fortuna fortune when you visit.
Yayoi Kusama: Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart
Ongoing – Fall 2025
For Yayoi Kusama, pumpkins have been a lifelong source of fascination. She was first drawn to them in childhood, citing their “generous unpretentiousness” and “spiritual balance,” and has explored them continually in her painting, sculpture, installation art, and poetry. They first appeared in her work in the 1940s and have been the subject of some of the most important works of her career. Today, polka-dotted pumpkins are synonymous with the artist and her idiosyncratic style. For her, polka dots represent self-obliteration — not in a destructive sense, but as a means of merging the individual with the larger universe. As we navigate the sculpture’s massive five-stem form and undulating walls, we are invited to share in the artist’s admiration for this symbol which embodies peace and joy.
