Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum

The first glimpse of her work is a newly commissioned piece, Four Ways of Being, across the street and down the block from the entrance to the museum, painted on the facade of the former Golden Goose New York Meatpacking building.

The Perfect Venue for This Exhibit

Once inside, it is clear that the Whitney Museum of American Art, with its tall white walls and spacious rooms, is the ideal venue for this exhibit, allowing the viewer ample room to be as close to or as far from the paintings as needed and to see them as individual works or as groups.

Grayscale Skin Tones

The people in all of Amy Sherald’s paintings are Black people. But their skin tones are in grisaille—gray scale—a color with ambiguous racial associations, challenging the viewer to reject preconceptions of race and color. The choice is influenced by her childhood interest in old black-and-white photographs of her family members, particularly her grandmother. She explains:

When asked on CBS Sunday Morning about why Michelle Obama’s skin was in grayscale in her portrait, she said:

In her earliest paintings, Sherald would find interesting people and stage them with thought-provoking props to create enigmatic narratives.

Classic Photographs Reimagined

Several of her later larger-format canvases are based on iconic American photographs. She recasts them with African American people, creating a new dialogue.

The original photograph includes only white laborers, reflecting the period’s racial exclusions. Sherald’s work intentionally disrupts this narrative by inserting a black figure into the conversation, thereby reclaiming a space in the photograph that omitted the contributions of Black workers. Sherald’s subject makes direct eye contact with the viewer, challenging the image of the passive laborer and positioning him as a self-aware participant in his own story.

This Sherald painting is clearly based on the Eisenstaedt photograph. There is a video at the exhibition showing Sherald with the iconic WWII image in hand, carefully adjusting the poses of her two models to match the earlier image and then making photographs of the models to guide the painting.

But the differences between the photograph and Sherald’s painting are many. Obviously, the painting depicts two Black people—people who were historically excluded from such post-war depictions despite serving, sacrificing, and contributing just as much as whites. The kiss in the painting is between two men. Gay people were (and often still are) left out of national celebrations and visual history. And unlike the event in the photograph—where the woman was kissed without consent—in the painting the kiss is consensual, tender, and intimate, showing a moment of quietness, intimacy, and respect.

A New Take on Americana

Other paintings have no specific precursor but are American to the core, with images that clearly make them American.

The image is rife with American iconography. He is in chinos, tennis shoes, a white T-shirt, with a denim jacket with the collar upturned. She is in pink, sporting a “Barbie” T-shirt and holding a pink flamingo cup. Behind them, a classic American soft-top automobile, a picket fence, and a yellow house that evokes Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The difference here, of course, is that the two subjects are African American, bringing Black people into this most American image.

Another perfectly American image: a beach cruiser bike with a handlebar basket with a bouquet of sunflowers and daisies, a picket fence, and an Andrew Wyeth-inspired house in the distance.

One of the iconic American activities of the 1960s, and still today, is watching rocket launches. Historically, that would have been documented as a white activity. Here, we see two African Americans watching a launch, one of them looking back at us voyeurs with a suspicious glance. Perhaps those two black-and-white bollards at the right of the painting tell us something of the space in between their experience and the original all-white space program.

The Michelle Obama Portrait

The exhibit’s best-known painting is undoubtedly the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Sherald’s representation of Michelle Obama is not about mythologizing or deifying her but about capturing a real, relatable person who transcends conventional political or cultural caricatures. She is portrayed without stereotype or politicized depiction. This approach not only marks a personal and artistic statement but also invites a broader conversation about race, identity, and inclusion within the American art narrative. At the unveiling ceremony, Michelle Obama said:

This very American exhibit is a spectacular showcase for a very American artist in the most American of art museums, in a time when it is sometimes troubling to be an American. For this American writer, it was absolutely uplifting.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York until August 10, 2025.