The Quiet Power of Presence: Amy Sherald at SFMOMA

With her signature grisaille tones and vibrant backdrops, the artist presents Black Americans in states of profound humanity, reshaping contemporary portraiture.

A large multi-panel artwork in a gallery setting features four life-sized portraits of Black individuals emerging from white doors, each topped with a distinct weather vane, against a sky-blue background, with several visitors observing the piece.
An installation view of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at SFMOMA. Photo: Matthew Millman

In SFMOMA’s “American Sublime,” Amy Sherald elevates portraiture through fifty luminous paintings that transform both canvas and cultural perspective. Her exhibition’s title resonates on multiple levels—”sublime” suggesting at once transcendent beauty, material transformation and the psychic conversion of raw experience into artistic vision—mirroring how her work reshapes contemporary representation. Her nearly life-sized subjects radiate monumental dignity, while her signature use of grayscale for skin tones suggests a metaphorical transformation that challenges viewers’ assumptions about and disarticulates skin color from race. Through this layered approach, Sherald thoughtfully explores Black identity in America while celebrating her subjects with undeniable beauty and complex interiority. Her artistic journey spans more than two decades, marked by distinct evolutionary phases.

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Over the past twenty years, Sherald has been prolific, painting nearly thirty portraits with modest success before gaining renown for painting First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018 and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Yet celebrity and tragedy aren’t her selection criteria. “I look for something I’d call presence—this quiet magnetism that pulls me in,” she told Observer. “It’s really about seeing someone who feels like they already have a story to tell, even before I paint them.” This democratic vision is evident in “American Sublime,” her most comprehensive exhibition to date, which opened in San Francisco in 2024 and travels to the Whitney next year—fulfilling a decade-long ambition. “I wrote in one of my journals that I wanted my first museum show to be at SFMOMA or the Whitney,” she recalled. “I started making work for the Whitney 10 years ago; I would just tell myself: ‘This painting right here is going to go into the Whitney.’ And lo and behold, now it will.”

A painted portrait of Michelle Obama shows her seated against a soft blue background, wearing a striking black and white geometric-patterned gown with accents of pink, yellow, and gray.
Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama. Courtesy SFMOMA

Despite her rise to prominence through high-profile commissions like Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor’s portraits, Sherald’s artistic vision remains focused on the nuanced humanity of ordinary subjects. Her elevation to preeminent contemporary painter status parallels contemporaries like Kerry James Marshall, who also references and challenges “the lack in the image bank” and recontextualizes the Western canon. As successful Black artists, they also reflect broader institutional shifts, from Sherald’s representation by Hauser & Wirth to Antwaun Sargent’s groundbreaking appointment as Gagosian director. This recognition extends beyond Sherald—Faith Ringgold at the New Museum (2022) paved the way for Black women artists in major institutions; Henry Taylor’s concurrent Whitney retrospective similarly reimagines Black portraiture, using focused detail against deliberately flat areas to capture both individual essence and collective experience. That these shows share space at major institutions reflects the art world’s belated recognition of Black excellence while creating pathways for future artists.

A woman in a long, patterned dress sits on a circular bench in an art gallery with a large painting of a Black man leaning on a green John Deere tractor against a bright blue sky in the background.
Amy Sherald at SFMOMA. Image by Kelvin Bulluck

Yet beyond these celebrated portraits lies a deeper artistic project: presenting Black Americans in states of unguarded existence, free from the burden of representation. This approach aligns her with other contemporary Black artists like Jordan Peele and Donald Glover, who similarly confront viewers with direct gazes. However, while Peele and Glover often use this technique to express alienation or critique systemic racism, Sherald’s subjects radiate a quiet dignity that transforms everyday moments into declarations of full personhood.

In her early work from 2007-2011, Sherald developed her signature technical elements—Sherald’s portraits contain a psychological potency telegraphed to the viewer through her subject’s direct gaze and pared-back backgrounds. Her isolated forms and austere settings evoke religious iconography that leverages solitary figures and simple backdrops, dislocating them from worldly distractions and temporal context. She gestures to European painters, applying the old master’s hyperrealistic chiaroscuro technique to her faces while leaving other areas—clothing, peculiar objects, or bodies—flat,  accentuating the subject’s faces and guiding the viewer to their unwavering stares. But above all else, the Surrealist René Magritte is her most frequent referent, as they both use monochromatic backdrops, prop-like objects and clothing that enrobes their figures. The pair of artists’ deployment of theatrical props tends to unmoor viewers, forcing them to question the mental reality of the subjects that the objects reflect. The Rabbit in the Hat (2020), for example, features a citrine-suited dandy—adding personal flair to an otherwise traditional silhouette—clasping a rabbit in a hat, while Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013) reveals a woman with a skull-sized porcelain teacup and saucer—the two visuals juxtaposed evoke Alice in Wonderland’s hallucinogenic journey. In parallel, Magritte’s The Son of Man (1946) features a more ascetically suited gentleman with an apple suspended in the air before his face, obscuring it and subverting the tenets of traditional portraiture and evincing curiosity, anonymity and conformity.

A painting of two Black men in sailor-inspired outfits passionately kissing features a vibrant blue background, with one man in a white hat and shirt embracing another dressed in a striped blue and white shirt with yellow pants.
Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country. Courtesy SFMOMA

By the mid-2010s, Sherald had refined her approach to color: this masterful manipulation of pigmentation extends beyond mere aesthetic choice into, again, psychological territory. Like Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, who wields saturated colors to externalize his characters’ inner turmoil and passions—most recently in The Room Next Door where Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore’s performances smolder against rich vermilions and cobalts—Sherald deploys vibrant monochromatic backgrounds as emotional counterpoints to her subjects’ contemplative states. These bold color fields, ranging from electric yellows to deep teals, create tension with her figures’ grisaille rendering, suggesting an interplay between public presentation and private reflection. The stark contrast amplifies the psychological weight of her subjects’ gazes while the pure, unmodulated colors echo the clarity and directness with which they confront the viewer, making the intimate feel monumental.

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The year 2018 marked a pivotal shift in both composition and content. Sherald moved from the single-figure paintings, which had become a signature element for her work, toward incorporating multiple figures, with Planes, Rockets, and Spaces in Between (2018) being her first foray into dual-figure compositions and away from her traditional settings, which were vividly plain (words you don’t often see side-by-side). The tableau reveals the two figures’ dyadic interaction, holding hands before a missile take-off, while the female figure’s frontal view almost breaks the fourth wall, meeting the viewer’s gaze as her companion and foil look on at the spectacular event. If asked which is more dramatic: the opposite-facing young man and young woman’s glimpse or the missile shot, the latter seems obvious if this piece existed in a vacuum. But, within the scope of Sherald’s oeuvre the human behavior is far more stark. Sherald’s subjects face the viewer with impenetrable visual force but are otherwise typically static or merely imply motion. If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019) and Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019) mark a seismic shift beyond single-figure portraits and into more complex environments.

A beach scene painting features two Black men carrying two Black women on their shoulders in front of an ocean backdrop, with a bold red-and-white striped beach umbrella and a picnic basket on the sand.
Amy Sherald, Precious Jewels by the Sea. Courtesy SFMOMA

Alongside expanded casting and those new environs, the signification of her figures’ emotional states became clearer through their interactions. Planes, Rockets, and Spaces in Between depicts intimate hand-holding against a dramatic launch, while If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It captures pure joy through airborne figures. The Bathers (2020), nodding to Renoir and Cezanne while reimagining the classical scene, continues this exploration of figures in the environment. Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024) pushes this evolution further, using landscape and intergenerational gathering to explore themes of community and inheritance. These multi-figure works create narratives through gesture and relationship, deepening the emotional resonance of Sherald’s portraits while maintaining her signature direct gaze.

As Sherald’s work has evolved technically and thematically through the 2020s, it increasingly engages with broader cultural conversations about representation. While Sherald’s connection to other Black and queer artists may be indirect, her artistic achievement is undeniable. Through her evolution from austere single portraits to complex multi-figure compositions, from minimal backgrounds to rich environments, she has maintained the penetrating psychological power of her subjects’ gazes while expanding their emotional resonance. This technical virtuosity serves a profound democratic vision—one that presents Black Americans existing freely, without the weight of representation or trauma. Sherald’s “American Sublime” realizes both a personal ambition for institutional recognition and a broader transformation in American art, where the everyday becomes transcendent through her subjects’ quiet dignity and unflinching presence.

A portrait of a Black man sitting atop a green steel beam against a blue sky shows him wearing a white turtleneck, striped orange pants, and a red beanie, with a calm and contemplative expression.
Amy Sherald, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It. Courtesy SFMOMA

Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view at SFMOMA through March 9, 2025.

The Quiet Power of Presence: Amy Sherald at SFMOMA