High Museum to showcase Amy Sherald’s uncensored retrospective this summer
Georgia-born artist Amy Sherald gained national media attention this summer (including a cover story in The New Yorker) when she pulled her solo exhibition from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., citing censorship concerns.
Atlantans will get to see the show, in its entirety, at the High Museum of Art, from May 15-Sept. 27.
The Atlanta stop of Sherald’s touring retrospective, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” was announced at the High Museum’s annual Driskell gala last month.
Randall Suffolk, director of the High Museum of Art, said Sherald’s show is a prime fit for Atlanta.
“Our audience already has a deep familiarity with Amy, given that she’s a Georgia native, a Clark Atlanta University graduate, and a Driskell Prize recipient,” he said of Sherald, who is from Columbus and won the 2018 David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History. “ … What’s exciting now is that ‘American Sublime’ will be the first opportunity for our audience to engage with the full measure of her practice.”
This will be Sherald’s first solo exhibition at the High. The museum did, however, showcase some of Sherald’s works in two past exhibitions: Her portrait of Michelle Obama was included in “The Obama Portraits Tour” in 2022; and two versions of her painting “Deliverance” were featured in the 2024 exhibition “Giants” from the collection of musicians Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. The “Deliverance” paintings were of dirt bike riders leaning back on their rides.
Atlantans who see “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” will have an opportunity to see the painting that sparked the censorship controversy in July and compelled Sherald to cancel her September show.
According to Sherald, as reported by The New York Times, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery had expressed concerns over exhibiting her painting “Trans Forming Liberty.” The painting is a portrait of the Nigerian trans model and performance artist Arewà Basit posed in the posture of the Statue of Liberty, wearing a satin blue gown and hot pink hair while holding a bouquet of flowers.
Those concerns were raised, Sherald surmised, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which asserted that the nation has witnessed an effort to rewrite national history. He argued that the Smithsonian has “in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
When Sherald heard the Smithsonian was considering censoring her painting, she said in a statement that it was clear to her “that institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role.”
In a letter Sherald wrote the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, published by The New York Times, she explained her rationale in yanking her art from the National Portrait Gallery schedule:
“Portraiture has always been my way of asserting presence — of creating visibility where there has too often been erasure. When that visibility is compromised, even subtly, it alters not only the artwork, but the message it carries. I cannot consent to that.”
Had Sherald’s exhibition been shown in September as planned, it would have been the first exhibition by a Black contemporary artist to ever be featured at the National Portrait Gallery.
The High Museum will be the fourth venue to host “Amy Sherald: American Sublime.” It has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It will be on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art Nov. 2 through April 5 before it comes to Atlanta.
“We’re really proud,” Suffolk said, “to share (Sherald’s work) with Atlanta while celebrating an artist whose work so strongly resonates with our community.”
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