Amy Sherald: American Sublime —The Quiet Power of the Grayscale Gaze

Currently featured in the landmark retrospective Amy Sherald: American Sublime, this monumental oil on canvas (106 × 101 in.) highlights Sherald’s mastery of “the ordinary as extraordinary.” By rendering her subjects in her signature grisaille (grayscale) palette, Sherald invites us to look past race and into the quiet, interior joy of a summer day. © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

From the Obama portrait to new triptychs, Amy Sherald: American Sublime offers a structural assessment of an artist refusing the spectacle of trauma.

BY KAZEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON

After months of public debate surrounding its presentation at the National Portrait Gallery, Amy Sherald: American Sublime arrived at the Baltimore Museum of Art with institutional clarity and curatorial purpose. Organized by Rhea L. Combs, the exhibition gathers more than fifty paintings spanning nearly two decades and marks the final venue of a national tour that included the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In Baltimore—Sherald’s home city—the survey functions as more than a home city celebration; it is a rigorous, structural assessment of an evolving visual language of portraiture. What emerges is not a spectacle of fame but a sustained study in dignity and stillness, where the artist’s refusal of trauma allows for a revolutionary recalibration of the American portrait.

Unlike its earlier iterations, which followed a largely chronological arc, the BMA installation adopts a cyclical structure. Chronology remains visible, but it no longer dictates the experience. Motifs recur across rooms. The opening work establishes themes that resurface at the exhibition’s close. This recursive design reinforces Sherald’s sustained inquiry into inheritance, watchfulness, and futurity rather than framing her career as a linear ascent.

Ecclesia: The Exhibition’s Opening Statement

That inquiry begins with Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024), a monumental triptych that signals both continuity and expansion. Three life-size figures stand within copper-roofed towers beneath rounded arches that recall Renaissance altarpieces. The title invokes the ancient Greek assembly and later the Christian church. Sherald, raised in Columbus, Georgia, draws from that spiritual vocabulary without submitting to its doctrine. Her figures wear contemporary clothing—a graphic T-shirt, a patterned vest, and a rainbow sundress—yet they assume the composure of saints. They do not meet our gaze. Instead, they look outward, squinting into bright light beyond the viewer. The gesture revises the contract of portraiture. These subjects refuse performance; they anticipate.

Ecclesia introduces one of Sherald’s central strategies: suspended time. The towers elevate and isolate. The figures appear poised between vigilance and waiting. As the exhibition’s threshold, the work establishes a mood of alert stillness that reverberates throughout the galleries.

Photography and the Grisaille Technique

Photography anchors Sherald’s process. She stages photographs with her sitters and translates those images into paint. The photograph provides structure, but it does not dictate meaning. On canvas, Sherald flattens space, sharpens contour, and renders skin in grayscale. This grisaille technique—now synonymous with her practice—removes literal skin tone while preserving racial identity. It redirects attention toward posture, dress, and interior presence.

In her early career, the grayscale strategy felt formally disruptive. In a survey of this scale, its repetition reveals both coherence and constraint. The consistency builds a distinct visual language. At moments, however, the contrast between matte gray skin and saturated grounds risks predictability. The strongest works complicate the formula through subtle shifts in stance, scale, or psychological charge.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime: Portraits of Power and Presence

Her 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor exemplifies that charge. Seated against a vivid turquoise field, Taylor wears a flowing blue dress. Sherald centers her body and stabilizes the composition through symmetry. The paint surface is smooth and controlled, with little visible brushwork. The portrait, first published on the cover of Vanity Fair, became a widely circulated image of national mourning. Yet Sherald resists spectacle. She refuses to frame Taylor as a martyr. Instead, she insists on her youth, elegance, and interior life. The painting asserts presence rather than memorializing trauma.

Sherald’s ascent into national visibility began when she won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016—the first Black artist and first woman to receive the award. Two years later, she unveiled her portrait of Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. That painting’s spare geometry and monumental patterned gown recalibrated expectations of official portraiture. Within American Sublime, it reads not as an anomaly but as a pivotal moment in the consolidation of her visual vocabulary.

For Love, and for Country: Patriotism and Black Identity

For Love, and For Country (2022) extends Amy Sherald’s established visual language into the charged terrain of nationalism. In the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the monumental canvas revisits Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photograph V-J Day in Times Square and recasts its iconic embrace. Sherald replaces the original white, heterosexual couple with two Black men in naval dress, transforming a familiar wartime image into a meditation on visibility and belonging. She strips away the bustle of Times Square and sets her figures against a luminous blue field. The spare composition sharpens our focus on their bodies and on the symbolism of the uniform.

Sherald renders the men with her characteristic composure. Their grayscale skin unsettles the patriotic codes carried by the crisp whites, striped shirt, and red scarf. The uniform signals service and state power, yet the intimate pose asserts tenderness within that structure. By queering a canonical image of national celebration, Sherald reclaims patriotic iconography while questioning who has been allowed to stand for the nation. She avoids spectacle or overt polemic. Instead, she lets the quiet authority of her figures hold the tension between love and country, intimacy and institution.

Restraint, Stillness, and Dignity

Across the exhibition, Sherald privileges restraint. Her brushwork remains controlled; her surfaces are matte and even. She avoids dramatic chiaroscuro and theatrical gestures. In this, she diverges from contemporaries such as Kehinde Wiley, whose portraits amplify decorative excess and historical quotation. Sherald strips away ornamentation. Her figures do not conquer space; they stabilize it.

The Baltimore installation enhances that stabilization. Generous sightlines allow figures to register across rooms, creating visual dialogues. The cyclical layout encourages viewers to revisit motifs rather than progress toward a climax. By the time one returns, conceptually, to Ecclesia, the outward gaze feels less enigmatic and more structural—a metaphor for an unfinished horizon.

Public Presence: Equilibrium Mural at the Parkway Theatre

Outside the museum, Sherald’s imprint remains visible on the historic Parkway Theatre, where a mural based on her painting Equilibrium depicts a young girl balancing a pole behind her neck and a clock suspended at her collarbone. The stopped timepiece echoes the temporal suspension inside the exhibition. Baltimore frames the survey not as an export but as a return.

Legacy and Impact in Contemporary American Art

Amy Sherald: American Sublime confirms the artist’s position within the contemporary canon while exposing the productive tensions within her practice. The grayscale device, once insurgent, now functions as a signature. Its repetition risks rigidity, yet her compositional intelligence continues to deepen. She refuses spectacles. She refuses to see trauma as an organizing principle. Instead, she insists on stillness, dignity, and psychological interiority.

As viewers exit, the figures in Ecclesia remain fixed on a horizon beyond the museum walls. The exhibition does not resolve their watchfulness. It affirms it. In doing so, Sherald expands the possibilities of portraiture and recalibrates how Black presence occupies the space of American painting.