It has been Amy Sherald’s fate to be known for one painting only. Her portrait of Michelle Obama, commissioned in 2018 by the National Portrait Gallery, brought the artist overnight fame. Ignoring the conventions of academic portraiture, a genre associated with pale men standing in front of burgundy drapes, Sherald liberated America’s first lady from the fusty, cigar-brown rooms of the past. Obama, dressed in a sleeveless gown, leans forward in her chair, channeling Rodin’s “Thinker.” The background, a featureless expanse of powder blue, suggests fresh air.
The painting is an anomaly in Sherald’s oeuvre. “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” a compact and rousing retrospective of 42 paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, brings us the work of an artist who is not primarily a recorder of first ladies or famous faces. Rather, Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize. She can be preachy, but her paintings are saved from sentimentality by an unerring sense of geometric design and a taste for spare, simplified, super-flat planes.
Stepping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the museum, you find yourself contemplating a curved, rather amazing wall hung with five life-size portraits, each in a different sizzling color. “The Girl Next Door” (2019), my favorite, shows a young woman in a white polka-dot dress, silhouetted against an emerald green background. Compared with the effortlessly attractive girl-next-door we know from countless films, Sherald has painted a touchingly awkward woman, her red leather belt rising up from her waist to her chest. But you can see that she is trying to look her best. Her immaculate dress, her red lipstick, her fixed-up hair with its attractive side part, are careful efforts at self-presentation that speak volumes about American girlhood.
Sherald, who is 51, composes her scenes with extreme deliberation. She picks out models for her paintings and outfits them with costumes and props. She photographs them and works from her reference photographs to situate Black faces and figures into roles and settings complete with suburban lawns, white picket fences and other nostalgic symbols of American plenty.
Here is a world in which it is usually summer, and days are squinty bright and shadowless. “I’m an escapist,” Sherald once said in an interview. “I love the Teletubbies — the idea of grass with no bugs makes me happy.”
Her titles add another layer of fictional intrigue. Sometimes taken from novels or poems, they alternately heroicize her figures or gently poke fun at the human capacity for small, foolish, everyday self-deceptions. For instance, “It Made Sense … Mostly in her Mind” (2011), shows a 30-ish woman dressed in a timeless navy blazer with gold buttons. She could be a lawyer until you notice she’s wearing a lavender plastic helmet and holding an old-fashioned toy, a pink-and-white unicorn stick horse. It doesn’t add up, but you can’t say Sherald didn’t warn us: The outfit did make sense … mostly in the subject’s wishful and daydreamy mind.
In some ways, Sherald’s paintings are re-enactments of the childhood game of dress up. She is drawn to loud, retro-ish fabrics — to wide stripes and dresses imprinted with floral patterns or strewed with rows of strawberries or cherries or lemons. She excels at painting pleated skirts, their folds of fabric as stately and evenly spaced as ancient Greek columns.
And note the exaggeratedly clean ambience. White shirts gleam with Tide-strength brightness, and khakis remain unblemished by mystery grease stains. You cannot find fresher clothing in the work of any contemporary painter, with the exception of Alex Katz, the pre-eminent realist, now in his 90s, who similarly garbs his figures in shirts and pants that look as if they were removed five minutes earlier from a J. Crew gift box. In the case of both artists, the squeaky-clean attire echoes in the formal neatness of their respective painting styles.
In Sherald’s case, at times I found myself searching in vain for any sign of an emphatic brush stroke, a trace of touch. This is especially true in a series of larger-than-life genre scenes that represent her more recent work. “A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt),” from 2022, a mural-size painting stretching 11 feet wide, shows a man sitting atop a brand-new green tractor. What’s problematic is that Sherald’s instinct for pristine surfaces — which adds so much allure to her images of clothing — makes the tractor look as blandly commercial as an item in a mail-order catalog. The man could be sitting in a printed ad for a John Deere 820.
Sherald’s vertical portraits, by contrast, retain their pictorial charisma despite a certain repetitiveness. Nearly all of the portraits in the show, which go back to 2008, are exactly the same size (54 inches by 43 inches). The figures in her paintings, whether men, women or children, tend to have the same unblinking, inscrutable expression. They gaze at you alertly but noncommittedly, as if listening in silent judgment as you tell them a story that doesn’t quite make sense.
Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1973, Sherald majored in fine art at Clark Atlanta, a historically Black university. She moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, earning her M.F.A. in 2004.
She has spoken openly about her health issues. She was just finishing graduate school when she was diagnosed with idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a serious heart condition. One day in 2012 she passed out in a Rite Aid pharmacy and woke up in a pool of blood. She was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she waited two months for a donor’s heart and then underwent surgery for a heart transplant.
Four years passed. In 2016, she rose to wide attention when she became the first woman and the first Black person to be awarded the grand prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which is open to any artist in the United States. Her entry, “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2014), is a coolly charming portrait of a Black woman in a bold polka-dot dress. She holds, in her white-gloved hands, an impossibly large teacup and saucer, exemplifying Sherald’s tendency to mingle realism and fantasy.
“Kingdom” (2022), for instance — one of the standouts of the show — is a low-angled, 10-foot-tall view of a schoolboy perched on the top rung of a playground slide, his spiky, stand-up hair silhouetted against a blue sky. In a sherpa-lined denim jacket, tan pants and unscuffed white sneakers, he could be any boy of 8 or 9, anyone’s brother or son. Except that he occupies the pinnacle of the painting’s Renaissance-style triangular composition, looming above us, a momentary king of the universe.
Sublime or Not Sublime?
So how should we categorize Sherald’s style? “American Sublime,” which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has a baffling title. The word “sublime,” an art-historical term, refers to art that inspires rapture or terror in a viewer, usually in response to the enormousness and grandeur of nature. When you open the Sherald exhibition catalog to Page 10 and see a full-page reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1817), an icon of German romanticism that appeared in a show that just closed at the Met, you wonder if you picked up the wrong catalog.
Sherald’s work is not sublime, but in its emphasis on the transforming power of clothing, it can fairly be called “superfine,” to borrow a word from the title of another Met show.`
Sherald, it seems clear, is an American realist, recording ordinary people and pleasures. Her work is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. He, too, combined and recombined reference photographs of his models to construct narratives of optimism and uplift about everyday Americans.
One of Rockwell’s acolytes, the painter Bo Bartlett, is a well-known realist, now 69, also from Columbus, Ga. Once, as a schoolgirl, Sherald saw a large-scale painting at the Columbus Museum that showed a Black man standing proudly outside a small brick house; it was painted by Bartlett, who is white. Sherald, who said she had never seen a painting of a Black person before, has described the moment as life changing, awakening her to how she wanted to spend her future. Even now, her genre scenes, especially “A Midsummer Afternoon Dream” (2021), nod to Bartlett’s luminous, blue-skied landscapes.
Sherald also owes something to Horace Pippin, the pioneering, early-20th-century Black artist. In his “Self-Portrait” (1941) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, he rendered his face as a mask of gray monotone. Sherald similarly depicts the skin tones of her figures in neutral gray rather than in natural browns. She has said that she uses grayscale to sidestep the issue of racial categorization. Yet she does take on politics, especially in her “Breonna Taylor” (2020), an ethereal turquoise-on-turquoise portrait of the 26-year-old medical worker who was killed in her own apartment in Louisville, Ky., in a botched police raid.
“American Sublime” will no doubt acquire a sharper political edge on Sept. 19, when it opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Portrait Gallery is part of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution and consequently vulnerable to recent orders from the executive branch seeking to dismantle or reshape programs that give off a whiff of diversity, equity or inclusion.
The irony is that Sherald’s work is not about categorizing one group or class of people. Rather it’s about characterizing folks with visibly different lives, ranging from a schoolgirl in pig tails to a legless boxer resting against ropes of red, white and blue, to a tall, transgender woman in a hot-pink wig and high-slit dress posing as the Statue of Liberty.
It is cliché these days to say that we want to “feel seen” or validated, but here’s the question: If we are all hoping to feel seen, who will be left to do the looking? Sherald, for one.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Through Aug. 10, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, 212-570-3600; whitney.org. The show opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 19.
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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