Seeing Amy Sherald in Atlanta

 The first time I saw a painting by Amy Sherald, it stopped me in my tracks. I was with my colleagues at the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, during an evening reception for the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) in 2023. As I wandered through the museum's contemporary art galleries, I suddenly found myself in a wide open room, standing in front of Sherald's luminous portrait of Breonna Taylor. She was an angel in a sky-blue dress, floating in a turquoise dreamscape. 

Amy Sherald's portrait of Breonna Taylor at the High Museum of Art, July 2026

At the Speed Museum, she stood alone on the wall. Tissues were placed discretely on a table beside a comfortable bench across from the painting. I sat, and I cried. Breonna's cataclysmic journey from aspiring nursing student to #BlackLivesMatter martyr to 21st century icon had taken less than a year. Commissioned by Vanity Fair and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sherald's painting was co-acquired by Taylor's home-town art museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. 

Now, six years later, it was on display at the High Museum in Atlanta. No longer alone, Sherald's painting of Taylor was flanked by portraits of two lesser-known Black women, and hung catecorner from a wall containing a portrait of a different sort of icon of Black womanhood: Michelle Obama. 

 

Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama at the High Museum of Art, July 2026

Unlike Taylor, whose skin tone is warmer and more naturalistic, Obama displays Sherald's signature use of gray-scale for the human parts of her portraits, contrasting with the bright colors deployed for the clothing and backgrounds. In the exhibition's audio guide, Sherald explained that her choice was intended to universalize her Black American figures while still emphasizing their unique presence in what the exhibition called the "American Sublime." 

In an exhibition dedicated to the work of a single artist it is possible to get to know their shifting moods and modes, while also witnessing visitors' responses to the language of the display. Sherald is at her best when her models are given the space to breathe into themselves, when the symbolism of their clothing, props, or backgrounds doesn't overshadow their expressiveness. Sherald is no stranger to the politics of identity and representation. Some of her works (such as a portrait of a trans-woman evoking the Statue of Liberty, or two Black sailors kissing in the guise of the famous Life magazine VJ Day photograph) are a bit too on the nose to move me in the way I was moved by her portrait of Breonna Taylor. But others ask more subtle questions of the viewer.  

"They Call Me Redbone, but I'd rather be Strawberry Shortcake." by Amy Sherald, 2009

"What's Different About Alice is that she has the most Incisive Way of Telling the Truth" by Amy Sherald, 2017

Watching the groups of visitors to the exhibition, many of whom took photos of themselves beside paintings that, to me, seemed to warrant more reverence than what I associate with the act of taking a selfie, I still felt a sense of pride in my city. Sherald's formal art education began at Clark Atlanta University. She is a product of this place and, in turn, people here are changed by viewing her art. I am grateful for this cycle of seeing.  

High Museum of Art, July 16, 2026