Michelle Obama made Amy Sherald famous. ‘American Sublime’ shows her full vision.

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” has opened at the High Museum of Art, bringing together the largest exhibition yet of the Georgia-born artist whose portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama helped make her one of the most recognizable painters in America.

The exhibit, which will run through September, features more than two dozen pieces from the celebrated artist.

Much of the work centers around Sherald’s idea of what it means to be American, and planting Black bodies within that ideology.

“I was missing seeing imagery of myself in art history,” Sherald says in a video that is part of the exhibition. “It wasn’t until I came across a painting that actually had a person of color in it — a Black person — that I realized that I had never seen that before.”

Visitors watch a documentary of Amy Sherald's life in the “American Sublime” exhibition at the High Museum of Art on Friday, May 15, 2026, in Atlanta. For painter Amy Sherald, the final stop of the national tour for “American Sublime”—the largest presentation of her work—feels like a homecoming. The exhibition opened at the High Museum of Art on Friday, May 15. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

Sherald uses a grayscale palette to mute the complexion of her Black subjects in all of her work. This is in an effort to remove the exoticization of Black people and eliminate the focus of shades of brown.

Instead, Sherald redirects attention toward gesture, posture, clothing and emotion rather than race alone.

Throughout the exhibition, Black subjects occupy spaces long tied to traditional ideas of American identity.

Inspired by monochrome family photographs from her childhood, Sherald brings a sense of memory and time-travel to her paintings. She photographs models before translating the images to canvas.

“(Sherald) is reflecting on what comes to represent ideas of Americanness and American history,” said High Museum of Art assistant curator of modern and contemporary art Angelica Arbelaez. “She points out to several kind symbols that continually come up, like the cowboy, or white-picket fence, or even a sailor returning home.

“All of these symbols, images, iconographies, have come to express ideas of freedom, beauty, success.”

The grandiose painting of Michelle Obama has a wall to itself. Adjacent on the right is “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” the painting that put Sherald in the running to be the artist for the former first lady’s portrait.

Visitors look at “Michelle Obama” in the “American Sublime” exhibition at the High Museum of Art on Friday, May 15, 2026, in Atlanta. (Hyosub Shin/AJC)

To the left, a portrait of Breonna Taylor floats in majestic cyan blue, suspended in a dreamlike calm that contrasts sharply with the violence surrounding Taylor’s death.

Nearby, the painting “She Always Believed the Good about Those She Loved” features the model who stood in to pose for the portrait of the late Breonna Taylor.

This time, however, she dons a navy-blue dress patterned with lemons, adding zest to an otherwise ordinary image. The painting subtly transforms the mood into that of perseverance.

The intricate detail of the portraits illustrates multiple textures and dimensions. The satin on the blue corset dress in “Trans Forming America,” a modern take on the Statue of Liberty, transcends the portrait.