An Amy Sherald Exhibition Is Coming to SFMOMA in November

Even if you don’t know Amy Sherald’s name, you’ll immediately recognize her work: larger-than-life oil paintings of Black subjects set against colorful backgrounds, their skin rendered in shades of gray.

You’ll remember her official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery, unveiled the same year Kehinde Wiley painted President Barack Obama. In it, the first lady is seated elegantly in a modernist-printed gown, calmly gazing directly out of the canvas.

Equally recognizable is her painting of Breonna Taylor, which appeared on the September 2020 cover of Vanity Fair, featuring Taylor in an ethereal turquoise dress designed specifically for this posthumous portrait.

Both those paintings — and about 50 others made since 2007 — will be included in Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the New York artist’s first mid-career survey, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Nov. 16, 2024–March 9, 2025. From San Francisco, the exhibition will travel on to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Curated by Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA’s curator and head of painting and sculpture, the exhibition will contextualize Sherald’s work within the canon of American realist and figurative painting, touching on her references to photography, Romanticism and iconic images from U.S. history. (On that last point, Sherald has painted a version of Alfred Eisenstaedt’ 1945 photograph V-J Day in Times Square, swapping the white heterosexual pair for a Black male couple in Navy-adjacent clothing.)

When I visited Sherald’s 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, the gallery was absolutely packed with visitors — all eager to take in her straightforward yet effortlessly meticulous paintings. Costuming is crucial to her work: figures are rendered in impeccably stylish outfits, then detached from reality against solid-hued backgrounds. Her buoyant use of color further emphasizes the grisaille tones of her subjects’ skin.

This desaturation is the oddest of Sherald’s aesthetic moves, and the results are arresting. Part Pleasantville, part hand-tinted photograph, it’s an effort on her part to highlight race as a construct, along with other calcified notions of gender, religion and social status. Come November, we’ll get plenty of opportunity to mull over all the issues her work touches on — and how she manages, with such care, to capture the essential qualities of her subjects.

‘Amy Sherald: American Sublime’ will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Nov. 16, 2024–March 9, 2025.