BmoreArt

For decades, long before painting Michelle Obama’s official portrait and obtaining global representation at mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth, Sherald’s stated goal has been to challenge the status quo of art history through the inclusion of Black American subjects, depicting individuals in a way that inserts them seamlessly into the permanent collections of museums all over the world.

These works, for the most part, portray ordinary people the artist encounters in her daily life, harnessing the power and language of historical portraiture and minting new icons. Sherald presents each subject as an elevated version of themselves, giving them the nobility previously reserved for the depiction of a monarch or patron of the arts that, in the encyclopedic Western museums Sherald encountered as a child, is (almost) always white. 

The best paintings reward you for slow and careful looking, with all manner of secrets revealed. Of all the paintings on display in Amy Sherald: American Sublime, a mid-career survey of approximately forty works across two decades now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) through April 5, 2025, Sherald’s portrait of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor commissioned for the cover of Vanity Fair has taken hold of me. 

From a distance, the young woman is magnetic. Her solemn eyes beckon from across the room—seeing you clearly, glinting intimately. Her gaze is the visage of someone wise beyond their years, smoldering with the deep knowledge of life and death. Then you notice the subtle shimmer of her lips, a gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck reminding you that she was a woman of faith, and her hand on her hip with an engagement ring, a crisp French manicure on her short but tidy fingernails. The diagonal folds of her crepe dress, designed for the portrait by Jasmine Elder of JIBRI, direct your eyes back to her face, a vertical framing element that elongates her body slightly through gentle waves of aquamarine. 

This elegant, lone figure—reminiscent of Ingres or Delacroix—is both tragic and triumphant: a beautiful woman but also a sainted martyr of racial violence in modern America. The life-size portrait is expertly rendered to give Taylor the veneration she deserves—attempting to replace, in some small way, what was stolen from her. 

Within the larger context of American Sublime, the Taylor portrait feels at home, nestled between dozens of kindred depictions of young Black Americans. In the newest works of the show, Sherald has scaled her vision up, including larger than life-sized paintings that include elements of landscape and architecture, culminating in the monumental three-panel Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons).

Similar to Taylor’s portrait, a regal aquamarine blue grounds the figures in sky and tropical ocean hues, and the skin of each of the three subjects is rendered in grayscale, but not without a subtle warmth pulsing beneath the surface. However, this time Sherald employs a strict composition with architectural framing elements to reference Gothic cathedrals and religious altarpieces, where large rectangular compositions with rounded tops were once painted inside arches. In Ecclesia, three lifesize figures gaze into the distance from within stark white copper-roofed towers, high above the viewer’s eyeline but also shadowed by glaring midday sun. 

The ambiguous setting is referenced in the mysterious title of the piece; “ecclesia” coming from the Greek word ekklesia, meaning congregation or assembly, often translated as “church” in the New Testament. What’s curious about Sherald’s composition is that her three figures appear to be singular and unaware of each other, definitely not a collective gathering, despite their deliberate arrangement in a triptych. Rather than thinking they’re different people within the same repeated space, the artist has painted three unique weather vanes atop each white box, featuring different marine life—dolphin, whale, and turtle—to show that each, while almost identical, is unique.

Since the term “ecclesia” alludes to a gathering, this forces the viewer to consider alternate ways that disparate individuals can come together around a shared goal, even if separated by geography, place, generation, or dogma. All three figures appear to be waiting, calmly, for someone or something to happen; their poise, elegant clothing, and elevated status surrounded by sky transforms each sitter into timeless versions of themselves: idealized, divine, and certainly allegorical.

Throughout the mid-career survey, the weight of its title, American Sublime, animates every single work with the artist’s desire to ennoble people who look like her, linking them indelibly to a shared art history, in order to make sure they are visibly present forever in public museum collections. Each figure is quintessentially American and uses specific props and clothing to place them in this time period. Each figure is also idealized and composed atop simple color-blocked backgrounds for a result that is sublime and worthy of admiration.

After successful runs at San Francisco MOMA and the Whitney Museum, Sublime was slated to open at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in September 2025. However, once Sherald realized that one or more of the paintings from the show might be removed in order to bend towards the current political climate, she cancelled the exhibition, despite it being the museum’s first solo show of a contemporary African American artist and a landmark moment in history. In a lightning-speed decision, the BMA was able to decisively step up and provide an unfettered platform for Sherald’s vision to be realized.

“This country’s story has always been a contradiction,” wrote Sherald in an August 24 MSNBC opinion editorial. “Slavery alongside freedom. Erasure alongside invention. Art carries what is too heavy for language to hold. And museums, at their best, give us the full picture rather than the flattering one. That independence is not ornamental. It is as vital to democracy as the freedom of the press.”

Seeing these canonical works back in Baltimore, the city where Sherald attended MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting and spent the first decade of her art career, is a cumulative, full circle moment. At least half of the models depicted in Sublime are from Baltimore. It gives the exhibition the feeling of an ecclesiastic gathering of old friends, a family reunion, a sacred circle. In Baltimore, American Sublime offers longtime Sherald fans and friends the opportunity to see ourselves reflected on her canvases, both timeless and timely.