What does it mean to see and to be seen? Amy Sherald’s monumental solo exhibition, American Sublime begs this question. Spanning nearly two decades of work, the exhibition, currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art is an assemblage of close to 50 portraits that reimagine the American realist tradition by centering Black subjects in moments of stillness, style, and sovereign presence.
Most known for her widely lauded 2018 portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, and more recently, for her 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, Sherald’s work serves as its own meditation on Black American life—her imagery existing somewhere between the fantastical and the mundane. Her vivid, large-scale paintings offer representations of Black interiority and the “every day,” an aesthetic and political commitment that refuses representational [read: racist] logics which so often render us as spectacle.
One of Sherald’s most consistent and studied formal choices is her signature use of grayscale skin tones against richly colored backgrounds. This choice is more than a stylistic signature, it’s a conceptual intervention. Her use of gray, a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1900 Paris Exposition photo series, The American Negro, disrupts the chromatic immediacy of race as we are used to recognizing it. Rooted in the grisaille tradition, Sherald strips her figures of pigmentation, not to obscure their identity, but to resist the flattening visual shorthand that so often surrounds Black life. In doing so, she allows her subjects to be perceived through their affect, posture, fashion, and poise—not just through their skin.
And yet, that very gesture—the removal of melanin—also opens up something thornier. Her grayscale bodies float somewhere between specificity and universality. They are Black, without question. But they are also rendered in tones that seem designed to transcend. This is where the dissonance begins to crack open: Sherald’s figures are wholly themselves, and yet the abstraction of color risks a kind of visual assimilation. In the space of the museum, among a largely white audience, these portraits can be claimed and gazed upon with reverence by largely non-Black crowds, while the Black people standing beside them remain unseen.
Perhaps there is a particular politic of viewing Black art that Sherald’s work forces us to contend with. Sherald gives us Black life with gentleness and dignity—but the institutional context within which her work is shown matters. In a space like the Whitney Museum of Art, the consumption of her portraits by largely white audiences feels fraught. Within the museum, beauty can be misread and reverence does not always mean recognition. In this liminal space between looking and seeing, I wonder: What does it mean to see and be seen?
And still, Sherald’s work is far from ambiguous. Her subjects, while muted in tone, are vivid in narrative and style. The fashion in her portraits is not incidental—it’s central to the stories she tells. Often adorned in vibrant, vintage-inspired attire that seem to transcend time, her sitters project a deep sense of style, and self-determined identity; a type of embodiment if you will. Fashion becomes a kind of speculative archive—a visual lexicon of memory, cultural inheritance, and individuality.
Take her famed portrait, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama. The former First Lady sits comfortably and fully embodied—at once regal and relaxed—wearing a geometric-patterned gown by Michelle Smith, awash in pacific blue. The dress evokes the 19th-century quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, created by a rural collective of African American women whose improvisational compositions are now recognized as foundational to American modernism. And yet the gown is resolutely contemporary. The dress’ sharp patterning and flowing form wrap around Mrs. Obama like a kind of cultural syntax as both a historical reference and statement of style.
In many ways, Sherald’s subjects do not perform for the viewer; they hold their own gaze. They lean, recline, and stand in their fullness. The world around them does not dictate their pose, and there is rarely urgency in their expression. In this sense, Sherald’s work feels far from protest art or any sort of overt radicality. Yet to depict Black life, by its very nature, is political.
In the late 1960s, following the assassination of social movement leaders like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Arts Movement took hold as the creative counterpart to the burgeoning Black Power Movement. Poetry, literature, music, and visual art flourished as tools of Black self-determination. Central to this artistic movement was a commitment to visualizing Black life through figurative expression—depicting Black life in no uncertain terms. Understanding Sherald’s portraits within this larger historical context of figurative expression helps to root her work in a political lineage committed to celebrating the fullness of Black life.
In this political moment where our humanity as Black people remains under siege with a new and violent fervor and where aesthetic celebration often outpaces material and spiritual care, Sherald’s portraits carry a quiet and dignified charge. Her sitters are more than symbols, they are stylists of self. The garments they wear—tulle skirts, oxford shoes, ruffled collars, and color-blocked suits—are not costumes but perhaps more aptly, declarations of their humanity. Each outfit in this sense serves as a memory and a call toward the work of world-building. They remind us that fashion has always been a tool for self-articulation, especially for those denied structural power.
In American Sublime, Sherald offers us more than portraiture; she gives us a mirror reflecting who we are and what we can be. Her work provokes us to ask how we really see Black life in the flesh, fabric, and imagination. Sherald’s portraits don’t just offer representation; they extend an invitation into a broader cultural cosmos. Her fashion choices, like her palette, position Black life as both every day and sublime, grounded and expansive. They ask us not only to look—but to feel, to question, and to stay with the tension.
Lead Image Credit:
Amy Sherald, “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” (2018), oil on linen; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (courtesy the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery)
