Review: Amy Sherald: Sublime at SFMOMA

Most people became aware of artist Amy Sherald in 2018 when her official portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. At first some were perplexed that Sherald had painted Mrs. Obama with gray skin, a standard feature of the artist’s work. But audiences – who doubled attendance at the Portrait Gallery in the first two years after the painting was on display – quickly embraced an image that invited them to look past skin color and focus on the look in the subject’s eyes. 

“Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,” the most famous painting in “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” Sherald’s midcareer retrospective at SFMOMA, is but one of dozens of compelling portraits of Black Americans being themselves. The exhibition, which debuted in San Francisco on November 16 and will run through March 9, 2025, before traveling to the Whitney Museum in New York, is the largest-ever showing of Sherald’s work.

Reading from a prepared statement at the press preview, Sherald said, “In this post-election landscape, ‘American Sublime’ is a salve, a call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen…. In a world where Black experiences have been historically marginalized or subjected to hardship, there is something inherently sublime in the very act of surviving, thriving, and expressing humanity and creativity in the face of such conditions.”

While the scale and perspective of some of the paintings – a man sitting high against a cloudless sky on a green girder, a child gazing down from the top of a shining playground slide, a farmer perched on a massive green John Deere tractor – intimate grandeur, the specificity of the faces summons real people, not allegorical figures. Even “For Love and Country,” (2018), which recasts a contemporary gay Black couple in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photograph of a sailor bending a nurse backwards in a kiss on V-J Day, feels inevitable. As curator Sarah Roberts writes, “Each person is a story.”  

The final gallery contains two of the most recent works. “Trans Forming Liberty” 2024 is the rare explicitly political piece. Addressing increasing legal and physical hostility against trans people and immigrants, Sherald depicts the Statue of Liberty as a transwoman in a blue gown holding a torch filled with marigolds.

In “American Grit” 2024, a boxer who resembles Zion Clark, the MMA fighter who was born without legs, is framed in a corner of a boxing ring. He rests on a stool, his empty red boxing shorts hanging down. The creases in his white leather boxing gloves look like grimaces. His torso is thick with toned muscle and his hairline and beard look freshly edged. The contrast between the beautiful, powerful top and the missing bottom could be read as a kind of Black American metaphor. But the pride and vulnerability in this man’s eyes are so much more than that. Look into those eyes and you might see any number of Black men in this country now and ever.  

In a video in the show, Sherald talks about growing up in Columbus, Georgia surrounded by black and white photos of her elders. “The eyes really tell a story,” she said. “That’s what draws me to black and white photography.”

Sherald, who is inspired by film, photography and literature, often has an idea for a story she wants to paint as she collects outfits and searches for models who will become partners in her project. She stages photo shoots and then paints from those images. The grayscale skin stands out against the vibrant wardrobes, leading the viewer to connect with the “humanity” and the “creativity” the work conveys. Look closely and you may start to feel you’re seeing someone you recognize. 

Carolayne Lage, 20, saw “American Sublime” opening weekend. “It was breathtaking and very heartwarming. Like every piece that she makes has its own story. And the color she uses helps people interpret that. One of the friends I took with me asked why is it gray? And I know it’s controversial sometimes,” Lage said, citing uproars when Black actresses are made up or photographed in ways that misrepresent their true skin tones. “I told my friends she paints in gray because she wants you to see the person and not what their skin color is.” 

Like many young people, Lage is still recovering from the election. “She’s trying to portray Black Americans as normal people when currently we’re very polarized in literally every aspect of the world right now like politics, family and friendships. I think painting these Black Americans as just Americans, especially with the gray tones, you focus on the person and who they are and not their skin color.” 

Lage, who is an Afro-Latina American, said of the show, “I see myself, because I do consider myself Black. You’re looking into their soul almost. I don’t have the word for it. You want to get to know them and you’re seeing them through their interests. Like there was a bunch of kid ones, like what they want to be when they grow up. It’s a reminder that just cuz our skin color is different doesn’t mean that you’re different from who I am.” 

Sherald’s “portraits of Americans doing everyday American things” includes “A Midsummer Afternoon Dream” (2023), a painting of a Black woman wearing a straw visor and a blue off-the-shoulder sundress standing on a lush lawn next to a yellow bike. There’s a white picket fence behind the woman and a fluffy white dog and a bunch of sunflowers in the bike’s basket. In “Precious Jewels by the Sea” (2019), two teenaged girls are perched on the shoulders of two teenaged boys standing on a beach by a big red and white sun umbrella. Even the portrait she made of Breonna Taylor, for the cover of a special Black Lives Matter issue of Vanity Fair magazine, shows a pretty “girly-girl” in a pretty aquamarine dress, wearing the engagement ring she didn’t live long enough to receive.