On a sun-drenched summer evening, some of New York’s finest artists gathered at the Whitney Museum for a private tour of Amy Sherald’s first major solo show, “American Sublime.” They’d been assembled by Broadway superproducer Jeffrey Seller and director Thomas Kail, who invited friends from New York’s bustling performing-arts community to take in and, hopefully, be inspired by the work of a truly great visual artist.
Forty-two of Sherald’s portraits, often depicting quotidian Black American life, have lined the walls of The Whitney since April 9. Among the collection are Sherald’s most heralded works: Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), which won Sherald the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition; Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, Sherald’s official portrait commissioned by the former first lady for the National Portrait Gallery; and Breonna Taylor, commissioned by Vanity Fair, Sherald’s portrait of the 26-year-old medical worker who was shot and killed by Louisville police officers during a botched raid of Taylor’s apartment.
“I wrote in my journal, on January 10 of 2025, that I wanted to see these figures worked out in a performance way,” Sherald exclusively told VF. A private showing for members of the theater community was arranged after Sherald met Kail at a dinner in April. “It’s a peak. It’s an apex,” she said of the event.
Luminaries like Hamilton’s Christopher Jackson, actor and playwright Anna Deavare Smith, Tony winner Sarah Jones, and famed casting director Bernie Telsey mixed and mingled while walking the halls of The Whitney, taking in Sherald’s exquisite paintings. Fresh off her run in Duke & Roya, Noma Dumezweni and recording artist Yola, who recently starred in Hadestown on Broadway, embraced and swapped stories about a “finger-lickingly Black” restaurant in New Orleans. Hollywood royalty Shonda Rhimes chatted up recent Tony nominee Glenn Davis about what they had just experienced.
“In this room are people that make things,” said Kail, to the crowd. “We are beholding things that have been made, and the question is, ‘What can we make from here?’”
Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator at The Whitney—who helped program Sherald’s show—has always seen an innate theatricality in her work. “There’s so much narrative: storytelling, character building, plotlines,” she told VF. “It’s all there in the painting. She gives Black people license to imagine.”
“Performing is visual. It moves,” said playwright, director, and actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson. He pointed to a Sherald painting: Handsome. “If I look at this painting, in my mind, I animate it. Who is that? What do they do? How do they sound? How do they walk?”
Sherald’s work similarly inspired other directors. Tony nominee Lileana Blain-Cruz was most awestruck by Sherald’s rendering of her subjects’ eyes—how they seem to be watching the viewer as much, if not more, than the viewer is watching them.
For actor Gabby Beans, who earned a Tony nomination after starring in Blain-Cruz’s 2022 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, it’s Sherald’s use of color—vibrant, bold backgrounds juxtaposed against the grayscale skin tones she gives her subjects—that strikes an emotional chord. “The gray…you kind of sit with them longer, because you can’t assume that you know them in a particular way,” she said.
In her remarks to the crowd, Sherald, 51, revealed that she only landed on this signature artistic practice in her late 30s. “I started using grayscale because I had a fear of the work being marginalized,” she said. “I didn’t want the work to be pushed in a corner. I wanted it to exist in a universal way. I wanted it to be able to connect to all people.”
The technique also had personal resonance for Sherald. “I just wanted to make something that looked like where I came from,” she said. “Something that was extraordinary and ordinary at the same time.”
From Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George—based on Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—to August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, which drew inspiration from a Romare Bearden print, art and theater have long been intertwined. “Leonardo da Vinci used to design sets,” said Kail to the audience he helped gather. “There was overlap. There was cross-pollination. We’re better in this institution, in this city, to maybe see if something could grow from that.”
Especially at this particular moment. Last month, according to The New York Times, Sherald withdrew her solo show from its planned transfer to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, after she was told that the museum had considered removing one painting—Trans Forming Liberty, which depicts Black transgender artist Arewà Basit as the Statue of Liberty—in order to avoid provoking President Donald Trump. (“The Trans Forming Liberty painting, which sought to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens, fundamentally strayed from the mission and spirit of our national museums,” Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president, said in a statement at the time. “The Statue of Liberty is not an abstract canvas for political expression—it is a revered and solemn symbol of freedom, inspiration, and national unity that defines the American spirit.”)
Trans Forming Liberty hangs on its own wall at The Whitney, and will remain there until Sherald’s solo show concludes on Sunday, August 10. “While institutions erase, we archive,” said Sherald. “While laws restrict, we insist on being seen. While history is rewritten, I try to write it back with my brushstrokes.”
As the sun set on The Whitney, many guests opted to stick around and process what they had just witnessed. And while it’s impossible to know where the next great piece of American theater might come from, perhaps its spark began tonight. “It could be right in this room,” said Davis.
“American Sublime” runs at The Whitney through August 10.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What’s Going On With Marjorie Taylor Greene?
-
George Clooney and Adam Sandler, Together at Last
-
The Heartbreaking Love Story of Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson
-
The Demise of a Hamptons Dream
-
Amanda Knox Even Shocked Amanda Knox
-
Paramount’s Fiery Backlash
-
When Hollywood Almost Killed James Baldwin
-
What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison
-
How Princess Diana Became a Fashion Icon
-
From the Archive: Dating Jeffrey Epstein
The post The Room Where It Happens: Amy Sherald Brings Broadway to the Whitney appeared first on Vanity Fair.
