Amy Sherald: American Sublime landed at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in November 2025 like an emissary from another time. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatched immigrants and citizens off the streets and armed National Guards roamed cities across the country, the exhibition put forward a vision of the United States as joyful, proud, and unequivocally Black. Take The Boy with No Past (2014) in which a young man wearing aviator goggles, yellow pants, a collared shirt, and a warm smile unabashedly stands in the glory of his own imagination. The BMA bills the show as a “homecoming” for the artist, who completed her MFA in painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004 and maintained a studio in the city until 2018.

As is well known, the museum was a late addition to the show’s tour, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and then travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art before arriving in Baltimore. Featuring almost forty works that Sherald executed between 2007 and 2024, the mid-career retrospective was originally slated for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. It was a fortuitous pivot. The BMA’s soaring and bright contemporary art galleries, which the museum deinstalled to accommodate the show, perfectly accentuate Sherald’s large, vibrant canvases, and the museum’s comparatively broad scope underscores the exhibition’s major premise—that in most cases the artist’s works are not in fact portraits of the models who posed for them, but images of America and American people today. The paintings may have been based on specific individuals, but in most cases, they represent Sherald’s vision of the United States, Blackness, and the inextricable relationship between them.

Organized into six sections, each of the show’s eight stunning galleries combines works from across the first approximately fifteen years of the artist’s career. The first gallery pointedly introduces the kind of work for which Sherald is best known: four fully frontal depictions of stylish, adult men and women standing against vibrant, monochromatic backgrounds. Each unnamed figure exhibits a complexity belied by the elegance and polish of the canvases themselves. Rather than naming the subjects and offering resolution to their identities, the poetic titles (As Soft as She Is . . ., Handsome) invite the viewer to sit with the uncertainty and richness of who they are and may be.

The show then takes viewers back to Sherald’s “Early Style,” characterized by her use of grisaille (or, gray-scale), surreal props, and turpentine-stained canvases that reflected her training under Grace Hartigan at MICA. Yet, what truly stands out in this room is the evident pentimenti. In Well Prepared and Maladjusted and The Rabbit in the Hat, for example, we see surprising traces of Sherald’s previous compositions, specifically alternative placements of the figures—scratchy black lines that reveal the intellectual and physical labor that undergirds her paintings’ vivid realism. Like the other strategies highlighted in this gallery, these marks challenge the apparent transparency of the genre of portraiture—the idea that a painting can offer an unmediated depiction of its subject. A thoughtful digital guide on the museum’s website reveals that all the paintings in this gallery and the following one feature Baltimore-based models, were made in Baltimore, or both.

The next gallery asserts the significance of “Photography and Process” to Sherald’s work and career. Photographs are the source material for her paintings and also the inspiration behind her investment in representation. In gems like All Things Bright and Beautiful, the medium’s influence primarily comes across in the models’ poses. In the previous gallery, all the figures stand perfectly upright—many with at least one arm hanging down by their side. Here, the paintings have a snapshot-like quality as though the models have been captured in situ and their surroundings erased.

The following section, “Power and Perspective,” attests to the artist’s interest in the politics of seeing. We learn that Sherald specifically requests that her paintings be hung lower than the standard height in museums. The artist’s goal is for visitors to be able to commune with her subjects rather than admire them from below. The impact of this decision is readily apparent in the galleries, where, across three visits, I saw viewers truly looking at the works rather than simply photographing them.

“An Inside and An Outside” hits upon a key facet of Sherald’s work: her ability to simultaneously visualize a person’s inner life, their public persona, and the space between these selves. Fashion and style play an important role here as do literary and popular culture, which Sherald references both within the paintings (the Barbie t-shirt in As American as Apple Pie, for example, and the camera in What’s different about Alice is that she has the most incisive way of telling the truth) and through the works’ allusive titles, which draw upon authors from Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston.

The following gallery showcases the commissions that marked Sherald’s ascension to popular acclaim. Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor are among the few recognizable faces in the exhibition. Despite or perhaps because of their renown, Sherald pictures them as regular people. We encounter Breonna Taylor as a poised and vivacious young woman rather than as a victim of police violence, and we gaze upon Michelle Obama in a moment of grace as much as grandeur. The installation at the BMA only enhanced Taylor’s humanity. At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which co-owns Breonna Taylor with the Speed Museum of Art in Louisville, the portrait has hung in an elegiac setting, mourning her death. At the BMA, it is displayed between depictions of two other young women and diagonally across from Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, honoring Taylor’s life.

The works in the last two galleries explicitly engage with myths and symbols of the United States—from its flag to the Statue of Liberty to visions and versions of the American dream. These works mark a dramatic shift in scale for Sherald—in terms of the physical size of the canvases, the complexity of the scenery, and, by extension, the ambition of her work. This section includes, among other works, a painting of a boxer without legs sited in the corner of a ring; two sailors reenacting Alfred Eisenstadt’s famous V-J Day kiss; and a woman leaning against a bicycle in a bucolic setting. In their explicit gestures towards narrative, these paintings resonate most strongly with the oeuvres of American realists like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, who Sherald has said she would like to be read alongside. They picture people in quiet moments of joy, resilience, and pride—only, in Sherald’s works, those people happen to be Black, differently abled, and/or queer. Together, as the introduction to the exhibition states, these canvases “produce a powerful meditation on the diversity and complexity of American identity.” It is a vision of the United States that, in 2025–2026, many of us have missed and that audiences in the DMV region almost did not get to see.

Sherald pulled American Sublime from the National Portrait Gallery upon learning that the Smithsonian Institution, which had recently come under scrutiny by the Trump Administration, was discussing how to install Trans Forming Liberty, a depiction of performer Arewà Basit as the monument on Ellis Island. As the artist put it, she did want to be party to a “debate [about] the value of trans visibility.” Representation—the importance of seeing oneself in art—has always been core to Sherald’s work. In interviews, she frequently notes that Bo Bartlett’s Object Permanence (1986) was the first painting of a Black person that she ever saw, and she says that seeing Kara Walker’s 2007–8 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York crystallized her commitment to depicting Black people “just being Black.” Yet, American Sublime—in which Sherald appears to have been a significant collaborator—equivocates on whether or not viewers should see the models as racialized subjects.

The introductory wall text certainly describes Sherald’s work in these terms. Situating her output in the tradition of other Black figurative artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner and Laura Wheeler Waring (one might add Barkley Hendricks), it states: “Sherald’s audacious project highlights what she has called the ‘wonder of what it is to be a Black American.’” However, other language seems to posit that the paintings do not explicitly engage with race. Following Sherald, the wall text for “Early Style” explains that she uses grisaille to “de-emphasize focus on her subjects’ race and instead draw attention to their individuality and inner life.” According to another label, she depicts “figures who are liberated from the performance of race, gender, religion, or other preconceived identity markers.” Such claims ask us to see the sitters as “Americans” first, before we see them as “Black Americans.” Visiting the exhibition with students in my contemporary US art class, we wondered whether Sherald’s use of grisaille, clothing, and cultural references does not “neutralize” the sitters’ Blackness so much as redefine it. In her paintings, we mused, Blackness is not a skin color or a racial category but an ethnicity, an inheritance, and a way of moving through the world with style and grace.

In the audio guide, the model for As Soft as She is . . .  said that she could see her grandmother in Sherald’s painting of her. Like the artist’s other figurative works, the painting reads like an enlarged and colorized black-and-white photograph that collapses time and generations into one body, one outfit, one picture. To encounter these works at the BMA, one glorious canvas after another, is to come face to face with this extended history and the hope that it portends.