From first lady to everyday life, artist Amy Sherald captures the beauty of Black America

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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April 2, 2025

By Antonia Hylton, NBC

“American Sublime” show, opens April 9th at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City (Kidfly182, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

More than 40 colorful and arresting paintings of Black American life will soon take the spotlight at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The “American Sublime” show, which opens April 9, solidifies realist painter Amy Sherald as one of the most important living artists in America. Sherald is renowned for her portraits of former first lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, but she typically finds inspiration in the beauty of strangers and everyday life.

One of the show’s featured pieces, “As American as apple pie,” features a warm and stylish Brooklyn couple who collect vintage cars. Sherald said she met the two by chance, sensing something special in them.

“I’m looking for soulmates,” Sherald said. “I really don’t know how to describe it. … It’s energetic. I think they have kind of a weight to their soul, like they’ve been here before.”

Sherald paints all her subjects’ skin in shades of gray to emphasize universality and shared experience while centering Black Americans in an artistic genre from which they were historically excluded. Her body of work is both an act of resistance against erasure and a celebration of joy and wonder.

Get more info about this exhibit.

See art by and about the Black community in our Special Exhibit Gallery.

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