The High Museum's new show features one of Georgia's most renowned living artists: Amy Sherald

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Amy Sherald is pictured with her 2022 painting, "A God Blessed Land."

Credit: Kelvin Bulluck

"American Sublime" is the Columbus, Ga. portraitist Amy Sherald's celebration of the trivialities, heartaches, joys and wonder of living in the United States.

Outside Atlanta's High Museum of Art on a sunny morning in May, Angelica Arbelaez, assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary Art,  said the new exhibition "will be a wonderful opportunity for visitors to get an understanding of Amy's practice and development as an artist."

"You get a sense of how she was thinking when she was in graduate school from the mid-2000s, and you get to trace her kind of artistic evolution all the way through 2024," Arbelaez said of the 39 portraits in this mid-career retrospective, presented as a touring show through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "So there will be much to see, particularly works that convey the way that she works with her sitters, the quiet depth and elegance with which she captures them, and also how Amy has just become more and more ambitious with the scale of her works, as well."

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In 2020, "Vanity Fair" magazine commissioned Amy Sherald to paint Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched police raid in Kentucky that year. It's part of Sherald's "American Sublime" collection at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2026.

Credit: Courtesy of Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald was born in West Georgia in 1973 and told PBS in 2023  about her first experience seeing a Black person depicted in a painting on a museum wall. It was Bo Bartlett's “Object Permanence.”

"As a sixth-grader, my first time going to a museum, when I saw this painting by Bo Bartlett, I was shocked that I was looking at a figure of a Black man," she recalled. "He was standing in front of a house. He had on a belt that had like some handyman stuff. I just remember standing there for a few minutes and like, I realized when I saw that work that I wanted to make paintings like that. I was able to see my future in that moment."

Sherald studied at Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College and the Maryland Institute College of Art. And in 2016, she became the first woman and first African American to win the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever portrait competition, which led to the commission of one of her most famous works: her 2018 portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. 

"She sought out to paint her as not only the woman that has gained the recognition that she has because she was the first Black first lady, but also acknowledging that she is an everyday person," Arbelaez explained. "[How] Amy does this, as she does with many of her portraits, is she tries to find a way to capture her sitters in a moment of repose, of dignity, and you really get that when you see the portrait of Mrs. Obama."

Other works in American Sublime include Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor, the woman killed by police in Louisville, Ky., in 2020, as well as "For Love, and for Country," a recreation of the famous 1945 photograph, "V-J Day in Times Square." 

This year, as the country celebrates 250 years, American Sublime is a fitting collection. As Sherald told PBS NewsHour in 2024, her work is a testament to the colorful lives of everyday Americans.

"Yes, the excellence of what it is to be an everyday American, the people that make the world go 'round," Sherald said. "All of these individuals that are in my portraits stand up as archetypes for that, because we can think about all of the big names and the big "H" of history, but the little "h" is what really makes everything, everything."

American Sublime runs from May 15 to Sept. 27, 2026, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.