Amy Sherald Comes Home: “American Sublime” Opens at the High Museum

Standing before an Amy Sherald painting is an exercise in aspiration. Her canvases, saturated with soft pastels and bold chromatic contrasts, construct an American landscape where Black subjects exist not at the margins of the imagination, but squarely at its center.

On May 15, the High Museum of Art opens “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” a mid-career retrospective featuring more than 35 paintings made between 2007 and 2024. It is the largest exhibition of Sherald’s work to date, and Atlanta is its final stop.

The road to the High was anything but straightforward. The exhibition, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was originally slated to close its national tour at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That changed after the Trump administration signed an executive order directing Smithsonian institutions to remove what it called “un-American content” from their exhibitions and programming.

“Amy was concerned that her work could potentially be censored,” said Angelica Arbelaez, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the High, “and that, for her, was something that she did not want for this exhibition.”

Sherald made the difficult decision to cancel the D.C. stop. Museums across the country moved quickly to fill the vacancy, and the High secured the fourth and final slot following the Baltimore Museum of Art. The announcement came in September 2024 at the museum’s Driskell Gala, where High Director Rand Suffolk made it official. What followed was roughly six months of coordination between the High, SFMOMA, Sherald’s studio, and her gallery, Hauser & Wirth.

Atlanta’s connection to Sherald runs deep. She was born in Columbus, Georgia, and attended Clark Atlanta University, earning her BFA in 1997. The High has honored her before, awarding her the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History in 2018. Her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama appeared at the museum as part of the 2022 Obama Portraits Tour, and a diptych of two motorcyclists was included in the 2024 “Giants” exhibition drawn from the collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz.

“American Sublime” brings that history into focus. The exhibition presents the Michelle Obama portrait alongside dozens of other works, many featuring ordinary Black Americans rendered with the same gravity and care typically reserved for heads of state. The show is organized into five thematic sections tracing Sherald’s development as an artist, from her early explorations of identity and performance to her most monumental, large-scale works and also includes a film showcasing her process.

“I grew up in a world that was very black and white,” Sherald said during a public conversation at the High. “It wasn’t until I moved back here for five or six years to take care of family that I realized a great part of my personality had been shaped by performance,  that assimilation was something I felt very comfortable with, making people feel comfortable with my presence. And I think that found its way into the work early on.”

Among the exhibition’s most significant works is Sherald’s Vanity Fair portrait of Breonna Taylor, a commission she approached with painstaking care. She met Taylor’s family, watched videos to hear her laugh, and composed the work deliberately to counter the rapid, often dehumanizing circulation of Taylor’s image following her 2020 death at the hands of Louisville police. It was the first time Sherald had painted someone who was not alive and present before her.

“We decided not to have Taylor isolated and sort of memorialized,” Arbelaez said, “but to have her among friends, among her peers, and to just acknowledge that in spite of the tragedy that fell upon her, she was just an ordinary girl before all of that.”

The dress Taylor wears in the portrait was designed by Jasmine Elder, an Atlanta-based designer. A small ring on Taylor’s hand was included to honor her relationship with her partner, who had intended to propose to her before her death.

Also on view is “For Love, and for Country,” which reimagines Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic V-J Day photograph with Black subjects at the center, and Sherald’s first triptych, “Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons),” created specifically for this exhibition.

Sherald has spoken about her work as an act of historical reclamation, describing the process of making paintings as one that reaches across time. “As Black artists, making work, we’re almost quantum leaping,” she said. “Every time I make a painting, I’m constantly reaching back from the past, but we have to be simultaneously in each era, present with the now and in the past,  while also trying to expand into something greater for the future.”

“American Sublime” runs May 15 through Sept. 27 at the High Museum of Art. 

“I hope visitors will walk away understanding how Amy developed as an artist, how she has been thinking about the way images work, how they create meaning, how they circulate in the world,” Arbelaez said. “She has a very deep and incredible commitment to rendering Black American life with joy, dignity, and confidence.”

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