courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)
The Smithsonian Institution announced that a solo exhibition of Amy Sherald is set to debut at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, exactly one year from now. Curated by Sarah Roberts, head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Amy Sherald: American Sublime will be the largest survey of the artist’s practice in her career, including over 40 works spanning 2007 to today.
The exhibition will debut at SFMOMA on November 16 before its run at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan from April to August 2025, after which it will return to DC for the NPG’s presentation on view from September through February 2026. An accompanying exhibition publication will be published as a collaboration between SFMOMA and Yale University Press.
Referencing black-and-white historical photographs, Sherald’s grisaille portraiture of Black American subjects was thrust into the spotlight in 2o16 when the artist won the NPG’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for her painting “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2013). Shortly afterward, Sherald was catapulted to international acclaim when Michelle Obama selected her to paint the official First Lady portrait, completed in 2018. The monochromatic representation of Obama’s portrait in contrast with the pale blue backdrop drew criticism online, to which Sherald responded via the Chicago Tribune: “Some people like their poetry to rhyme. Some people don’t.”
“To me when you see brown skin, it tends to codify something,” she continued. “So through the gray you’re almost allowed to look past that into the real person.”
Two months after its installation at the NPG in February 2018, the institution reported a record-breaking attendance hike, with over 35,000 visitors checking into the galleries on March 24 after the March For Our Lives.
“The Portrait Gallery’s presentation of Amy Sherald: American Sublime celebrates a full circle of sorts,” said Rhea L. Combs, the director of curatorial affairs at NPG, in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “For the past eight years, Sherald’s art has enthralled viewers with its technical astuteness. With this mid-career survey, it is an honor to share with audiences the breadth and depth of Sherald’s practice.”
In addition to the artist’s portrait of Obama, Sherald’s tribute to Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black emergency medical technician who was killed in her home by Louisville police in 2020 during a no-knock raid, and “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” will be displayed alongside various new and rarely seen works.
American Sublime will be the first solo exhibition devoted to a Black contemporary artist at the National Portrait Gallery. When asked about navigating the art world as a Black woman artist, Sherald told Hyperallergic in 2018, “I just go into these spaces as myself.”
“The work goes in as a representation of who I am,” Sherald continued, adding that she hoped her visibility as a Black woman artist would open doors for young people who face the same discouragement about entering the field as she did growing up. “I think the work sits in the world in the same way that I do where it’s not in your face, but there’s a lot of subversive messages happening, and they are diplomatically presenting a corrective narrative.”
54 x 43 x 2 1/2 inches (~137.2 x 109.2 x 6.6 cm) (© Amy Sherald; photo by Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)
