American Sublime

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the first mid-career survey of the renowned artist’s work, from November 16th, 2024, to March 9th, 2025. This comprehensive exhibition, curated by Sarah Roberts, will showcase nearly 50 of Sherald’s paintings created between 2007 and the present, offering a profound exploration of Black identity and representation in American culture. American Sublime will include Sherald’s iconic portraits, such as her famous painting of Michelle Obama, as well as works never before seen in public.

A standout piece in the exhibition will be For Love, and for Country (2022), recently acquired by SFMOMA, which reimagines Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous 1945 photograph of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square, replacing the woman with another man to make a powerful statement against rising discrimination and restrictive legislation. Another major work, If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, draws inspiration from Charles C. Ebbets’s iconic Lunch atop a Skyscraper photograph, while highlighting the forgotten contributions of Black workers to American industrial progress.

The exhibition will also include poignant works centered on Black youth, such as The Boy with No Past, where Sherald imagines a Black child growing up free from the oppressive legacies of racism. The gallery The Girl Next Door will present Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, offering a moving depiction of the young woman as a symbol of vitality and potential. In An Inside and an Outside, Sherald examines the tension between public and private selves, with works like She had an inside and an outside now, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime invites viewers to reflect on race, representation, and the transformative power of art in shaping cultural narratives. Following its debut at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.