American Sublime’ At The Whitney Re-imagines American Realism With Singular Visual Narratives

Two figures – one in a breezy, colorful striped sundress and a white hair band, another with cropped hair in a white t-shirt and denim miniskirt – hold hands. The woman in the dress gazes back at the viewer, while the other woman stares intently at a powerful stream of hot, expanding gases that escape through the nozzle of a rocket that’s just launched. The horizon is low and the pale blue sky occupies most of the monumental canvas. The nearly life-size women own the scene, they own the experience, and our role is only to observe.

Planes, rockets, and the spaces in between (2018) – at the time, the largest painting executed by Amy Sherald – was some three years in the making after the master painter and storyteller of the contemporary African American experience in the United States stretched the massive canvas. The Columbus, Georgia-born, New York City area-based artist reclaims the quintessentially American experience of gathering to watch a rocket launch, from the white men who rule the U.S. space program. Only 18 of the 360 astronauts enlisted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been Black, with Guion Bluford becoming the first African American in space in 1983.

Sherald met the two women (a teacher and a recent graduate) who served as her models at the Baltimore Renaissance Academy High School, while raising money to send students to see Black Panther, the superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. At grand scale, an everyday experience became an exceptional painting.

On loan from the Baltimore Museum of Art – which purchased it with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. – the oil on canvas is among 50 stunning paintings from 2007 to the present on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through August 10. Amy Sherald: American Sublime, the trailblazing artist’s first major museum survey is another must-see blockbuster exhibition at the Whitney, which has made tremendous gains in drawing crowds to recent blockbuster exhibitions – Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night (on view through July 6) and Edges Of Ailey – that make the art itself accessible to a broader audience.

It’s impossible not to shudder while admiring Sherald’s elegant portrait of Breonna Taylor or to long for less oppressive times when examining her regal portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, both exemplifying the notion of American Sublime. The title is borrowed from Elizabeth Alexander’s fourth collection persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica which examines the Black experience through the lens of the slave rebellion on the Amistad and nineteenth-century American art. Sherald’s work is imbued with witty literary references (Jane Austen, Octavia E. Butler, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison) and clever art historical homage.

Sherald rocketed to national prominence when Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014) became the first woman and the first African American to win the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. A girl in a v-neck sheath dress, one half solid with white piping the other half adorned in polka dots, looks directly at the viewer, her intense gaze commanding attention under a bold crimson beret. Donning white gloves, she holds an oversize teacup over a saucer, as if she’s written into Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Mad Tea Party. Surrealism comes into play in several works, never drawing us away from the real circumstances of Sherald’s subjects.

Sherald subverts U.S. history by meticulously posing a gay Black couple in place of an unidentified uniformed sailor and a uniformed nurse (a 2012 book identified them as George Mendonsa and Greta Friedman) in a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt published in Life magazine and became one of the most famous images of the 20th century. The photograph from August 14, 1945, commemorating V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting in World War II, is an iconic symbol of emotion and victory, and Sherald extends that raw energy to Black soldiers who returned from the war to a still-segregated nation, and re-imagines masculine identities.

Look closely at the faces, gazes, poses, and hand positions of each of Sherald’s subjects, and how some interact with landscapes and play with scale and perception. The stories are original, profound, multifaceted, and focused, and each complex visual narrative underscores Sherald’s commitment to sharing her world view, her America.

Sherald’s oeuvre so far is singular in its advancement of the American Realist tradition of artists such as Edward Hopper, who were foundational to the Whitney’s founding in 1930, by presenting a new tradition that emerged from art departments and galleries of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where she first trained as an artist.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime is organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Sarah Roberts, former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. The Whitney presentation is organized by Arnhold Associate Curator Rujeko Hockley with curatorial assistant David Lisbon.