A sweeping exhibition of works by the acclaimed American painter Amy Sherald, best known for her portraits of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, is coming to New York City this spring. Nearly 50 portraits of Black Americans will go on display as part of Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 9 through August 10. The mid-career survey is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York museum.
Spanning works from 2007 to the present, the show will explore Sherald’s signature figures rendered with skin tones in shades of gray and colorful clothing against vibrant backgrounds, merging black-and-white photography aesthetics and American Realist painting traditions to redress art history’s long exclusion of Black subjects in portraiture.
The exhibition will feature a slew of works, placing rarely-seen paintings alongside those that have garnered widespread acclaim, such as Sherald’s official portrait of Michelle Obama, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition grand-prize winner “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2013), and the artist’s moving tribute to Breonna Taylor, a Louisville medical worker who was killed by police in 2020. Taylor’s name became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing attention to police violence against Black women and the #SayHerName campaign.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime will be paired with a billboard installation across the street from the museum’s Gansevoort Street entrance and the High Line that will bring together four portraits by the artist. Titled “Four Ways of Being,” the commission will go on view on March 25 and remain on display through September.
The survey’s New York presentation, curated by Sarah Roberts, will follow its debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After its run at the Whitney, it will travel to Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, where it will go on view from September through February 2026.
