Amy Sherald: American Sublime on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through April 2026

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) opens Amy Sherald: American Sublime on Sunday, November 2, 2025, presenting the artist’s acclaimed mid-career survey as a special ticketed exhibition. On view in Baltimore through April 5, 2026, the show is described as the most comprehensive presentation of Sherald’s work to date, tracing the arc of her practice from 2007 to 2024 through 38 paintings.

BMA frames the presentation as a homecoming. Sherald earned her MFA in painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and lived and worked in Baltimore during formative years of her career, a history the museum connects directly to the city’s presence in her subjects, titles, and canvases.

What the exhibition includes

The museum positions American Sublime as a walk from early, emotionally direct works into the larger-scale portraits that made Sherald widely recognizable. Highlights named in the release include Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), Sherald’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition winning painting; her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama; Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), a sweeping triptych created for the exhibition; her memorial portrait of Breonna Taylor; and the monumental painting Trans Forming Liberty, alongside many other works.

Across the show, BMA emphasizes Sherald’s sustained reworking of Anglo-European portrait traditions through depictions of everyday people situated in everyday life, with an attention to narrative built through color, pose, and dress.

A Baltimore connection that shapes the story

BMA’s relationship with Sherald is presented as longstanding. The museum notes it began championing her work when it acquired Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between in 2018, the year the painting was made, and has included her in multiple group exhibitions and programs since.

The timing also intersects with the museum’s gala calendar. BMA had already planned to honor Sherald with an “Artist Who Inspires” award at its 2025 BMA Ball on November 22, and the release frames the exhibition as deepening that institutional recognition in the city where she built key parts of her foundation.

How Sherald builds a portrait world

BMA’s exhibition overview reads like a guide to Sherald’s method. Photography functions as a core tool, described as her sketchbook and the base for her compositions. With the exception of her two commissioned portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, Sherald selects sitters through observation, drawn to qualities such as poise, style, or wit, what she calls an “ineffable spark.” She photographs sitters as they pose organically, then shapes the final narrative through curation and styling, using clothing as a storytelling device.

The museum also points to Sherald’s signature approach to skin tones, using a gray palette that encourages viewers to move past surface reactions and toward shared human commonality.

Titles become another layer of meaning. BMA notes that Sherald often draws inspiration from Black women writers and poets such as Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton, reinterpreting their language to build new contexts around the interior worlds of her subjects and to expand visual stories of American identity, history, and belonging.

Touring context and curatorial credits

American Sublime is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Sarah Roberts, SFMOMA’s former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition premiered at SFMOMA in fall 2024 and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in spring 2025 before arriving in Baltimore as its third venue.

BMA’s presentation is organized by Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, with Cecilia Wichmann, Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art; Antoinette Roberts, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art; and Dylan Kaleikaumaka Hill, Meyerhoff-Becker Curatorial Fellow.

The catalog and support

The exhibition is accompanied by an eponymous publication, described by BMA as Sherald’s first comprehensive monograph, with contributions including Sarah Roberts, Elizabeth Alexander, Dario Calmese, and Rhea Combs, published by SFMOMA in association with Yale University Press.

BMA lists exhibition support led by the Mellon Foundation, with major support from the Ford Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and Hauser & Wirth, alongside additional named supporters.