Two nights before “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” opened at the High Museum of Art, celebrated painter and Georgia native Amy Sherald took the stage with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and writer RaMell Ross and High Museum assistant curator of modern and contemporary art Angelica Arbelaez for a wide-ranging conversation: the American South as a creative force, the politics of gaze, the limits of representation, the role of the ordinary in contemporary Black art — and a preview of Sherald’s next creative move.
“American Sublime” debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2024, then traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Baltimore Museum of Art before landing at the High, its fourth and final stop. The exhibition brings together more than 35 paintings made between 2007 and 2024, the most comprehensive presentation of Sherald’s work to date. Among them: her renowned portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama and her portrait of Breonna Taylor, commissioned by Vanity Fair.
For Sherald, who was born in Columbus, Georgia and trained as a painter in Atlanta, the evening carried the comfort of a homecoming. “I don’t think I would be making the work that I make now had I not been born here,” she said.
A few highlights from the conversation.
The South shapes everything.
Sherald credits the South with making her the artist she is. Spending time back in Georgia as an adult caring for family sharpened that understanding. She saw how performance — knowing how to move through Black and white spaces, how to make people comfortable with your presence — had quietly organized her interior life. “I wanted to abstract the real Amy out of all of that,” she said. Her paintings are where she does that work. Ross pushed the frame wider. His 2018 Sundance award-winning film, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” documents the lives of residents of Alabama’s Black Belt. “Going to Hale County, Alabama and living there, making images and trying to think intentionally about the origin of our identities, and then being literally confronted with the notion of time,” he said, “it just restarts your relationship to the world.”
(Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth)
The gaze holds weight.
Arbelaez surfaced a question Ross posed in an earlier conversation: What does sustained, unhurried looking do to the assumptions carried about Black people? She connected it directly to Sherald’s portraits, most of which meet the viewer head-on. Sherald took the idea even deeper into her work, tying it to her use of grayscale. “When people are like, ‘Why did you paint them in grayscale?’ I think that’s why … because you have to stop and look … what’s different about this? And it gives you a different entry point.”
“‘American Sublime’ on Broadway. Let’s get that in our heads.”
Artist Amy sherald
Representation isn’t transformation.
“I’ve made so many murals in so many disenfranchised neighborhoods,” Sherald said during the conversation. “And, I realized, ‘This really isn’t care. This is people making other people feel like they do care, but not enough to do anything but pay an artist to put a mural in your neighborhood.'” The deeper problem, she argued, is that institutions absorb the language of change without doing the work of it. “Black faces in high spaces doesn’t mean that it’s changing places,” she said. “There’s this moral line that’s drawn with representation that it feels like there’s change, but it’s not really transforming power. And then institutions pick up that kind of language and it’s used in a way that doesn’t exactly exemplify change.”
The ordinary is the point.
Sherald and Ross arrived at a shared reverence for everyday life by almost losing theirs. Sherald received a heart failure diagnosis at 30. Ross became seriously ill while traveling abroad at 23. What that kind of urgency does, Ross shared, is make the mundane, a walk to the mailbox, for example, matter. He calls it “The Epic Banal,” the idea that the most meaningful things show up in the smallest moments. Sherald talked about how, after seeing an exhibition at the Whitney in 2008, she left asking what conversation was missing from contemporary art. The answer was the ordinary. “I just wanted to see something regular and normal that I had really never seen before,” she said.
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The portraits have more to say.
For years, Sherald has imagined her subjects holding stories paintings can only hint at. Theater, she’s decided, is how she gets those stories get told. “I wanted to see my portraits workshopped by playwrights,” she said. The result? Eight short plays based on eight individual portraits, presented as an ensemble. Excerpts debut June 22 at National Black Theater, Adventureland, and Public Theater in New York City. “American Sublime on Broadway,” Sherald said. “Let’s get that in our heads.”
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view through Sept. 27 at the High Museum of Art.
