Amy Sherald - American Sublime - Whitney Museum of American Art

Amy Sherald is a storyteller. She creates precisely crafted narratives of American life, selecting, styling, and photographing her sitters as the foundation for her nuanced paintings. Thus, while Sherald (b. 1973; Columbus, Georgia) bases her works on specific people, they are more than traditional portraits. They center everyday Black Americans, compelling in their individuality and extraordinary in their ordinariness, inviting viewers to step into Sherald’s imagined worlds. In this exhibition, paintings of such ordinary Americans join her iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and, heartbreakingly, Breonna Taylor, to produce a resonant ode to the multiplicity and complexity of American identity. 

Sherald also makes the images she wants to see in the world. Although she considers herself an inheritor of the American Realist tradition of artists such as Edward Hopper—a genre that was central to the Whitney’s origins nearly a century ago—those artists focused on the lives of everyday white Americans.

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