Washingtonians likely recognize Amy Sherald as the painter behind Michelle Obama’s official First Lady portrait. Next year, the DC area will have the opportunity to experience Sherald’s work in a new way through an exhibition—her first major museum show—set to debut at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” will showcase more than 50 of Sherald’s paintings—both familiar and never-before-seen—created from 2007 to the present, according to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition debuted in April. Sherald will be the first contemporary Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs for the National Portrait Gallery, is organizing the DC presentation of the exhibition. She tells Washingtonian that the display will serve as “an incredible sort of ‘welcome home’ ” to Sherald, whose rise to international acclaim can be traced across her experiences in the DMV.
While Sherald was based in Baltimore—she holds both an MFA in painting and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art—she submitted her 2014 work “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” to the Portrait Gallery’s 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. She was the first woman and first African American to win the contest.
First-place Outwin Boochever winners receive a $25,000 cash prize and a commission to create a portrait of a remarkable living American for the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. That is how Sherald’s 2018 painting of Obama came to be. The work drew record numbers of visitors into the Portrait Gallery—to the extent that the painting was relocated to a larger space in response to the crowds, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Although Sherald is originally from Georgia, Combs says the show is “a full-circle moment for one of [the DC area’s] adopted children.”
“To be able to have a platform like a portrait competition that then turns into a commission that then helps someone become an internationally recognized artist is literally the chef’s kiss,” Combs says. “There’s nothing, no better feeling than that for a curator.”
Accompanying the Obama portrait and the return of “Miss Everything” will be Sherald’s 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, which appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair that September and later anchored the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s “Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience.” exhibit.
“American Sublime” will be the first of Sherald’s shows to explore the relationship between her portraits and their referential materials. Visitors can expect to see her 2022 painting, “For love, and for country,” which parallels Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic 1945 image “V-J Day in Times Square.” Sherald’s reimagining of the source photo—which captured a male sailor brazenly kissing a woman on the day Japan surrendered to mark the end of World War II—features two uniformed Black men in place of the straight, white couple.
In addition to Sherald’s previously displayed work, the exhibition will also feature “new and rarely seen” pieces, according to a press release from the Portrait Gallery.
Sherald’s paintings center the everyday experiences of Black Americans—in fact, she often invites people she meets on the street to sit for her portraits, an artistic process that gallery texts at the exhibition will further explore. Her work is noted for its use of grisaille—grayscale color palettes—to depict her subjects’ skin tones, a choice meant to “highlight race as a construct,” the Smithsonian says in a press release.
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” will premiere at the National Portrait Gallery on September 19, 2025 and run through February 22, 2026.
