Amy Sherald’s American Sublime opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art in November as a long-awaited museum survey for an artist whose portraits have reshaped contemporary American painting. Bringing together 38 works made between 2007 and today, the exhibition follows her development from early studio pieces to the images that placed her squarely in the national spotlight.
With this exhibition, visitors are able to move through more than a decade of work and see how steady her approach has been from the start. Sherald paints Black people with care, and grayscale skin tones and flat fields of color shift the focus away from assumptions about race and toward character. Viewers actually spend time with each person rather than reading them at a glance.
“American Sublime is a salve,” Sherald said during her opening artist talk. “It’s a call to remember our shared humanity and an insistence on being seen.” Baltimore gives the show added meaning. Sherald studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and spent key years building her practice in the city. Several paintings on view were created there, often with local residents serving as models. Familiar streets and relationships sit behind the work, even when the backgrounds are reduced to color.
The events that surrounded the exhibition’s arrival have been talked about for months ahead of the debut. Sherald withdrew a planned solo show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after learning the institution was considering removing Trans Forming Liberty, her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty. Showing the full body of work in Baltimore allows her to present the paintings without edits or conditions, in a place that helped form her voice.
Many of the artist’s most recognized works appear at the BMA. Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), which won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Her portrait of Michelle Obama, the Vanity Fair commission honoring Breonna Taylor, and the large-scale Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), among others. Seeing these pieces together highlights how Sherald favors stillness and clarity, especially amidst the current state of the country, and the world at large.
During a public conversation with Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Sherald spoke about how early she committed to her career. “I knew in second grade that I wanted to be an artist. It’s all I wanted to do,” she said. “Mostly because it didn’t require me being around other people. I was just naturally inclined to make things. I wasn’t studying art history. I wasn’t going to museums. I was just constantly making.” Although she was clear on what she wanted to do at an early age, her path wasn’t direct, per se. Sherald began college as a pre-med student at Spelman before changing course late in her studies, a decision she kept to herself at the time.
“Nobody in my family knew what it meant for me to say that I was going to be an artist, and I didn’t know what that meant either,” she said. “We didn’t grow up going to museums. I went to my first museum in college and didn’t go back again until grad school. But even when I wasn’t making work, I was always painting in my head.”
As many of the artist’s longtime followers may know, hue plays a key role in how the paintings function. Viewers sometimes read those backgrounds as decorative, which they can be, but Sherald approaches them with a bit more intention.
“Color has energy, and color can be directed in any way you want it to go to create a specific feeling or emotion,” she explained. “That’s where a lot of the energy comes from the work. The colors create portals for people to enter into the painting.”
The exhibition’s visceral title, American Sublime, serves as a distinct reflection of how Sherald wants this particular body of work to be framed. She has been clear about the language and the scope of the show, pushing back against labels that intend to sway the conversation in one direction or another.
“This is not an exhibition of a Black painter who paints Black people—that’s very diminishing,” Sherald said. “This is an exhibition of an American person painting American people. I needed ‘American’ in the title because I wanted that to be the most salient thing on people’s minds when they walk in.”
Amy Sherald’s American Sublime is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through April 5, 2026.