Amy Sherald, “As American as Apple Pie” (2020) in Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art (photo Hyperallergic)Once, when I was involved in a romance that was slowly coming to a close, I described to my then-partner that I felt like my life was losing color. On seeing Amy Sherald’s American Sublime exhibition at the Whitney Museum, I was reminded of that moment — not because her work creates or documents similarly bleak circumstances, but rather because her paintings remind me just how much we viewers miss when we don’t see the figures in her work primarily in terms of their color, that is to say their race — which is a thing she has advocated for. In one of American Sublime’s galleries, the Art21 video “Amy Sherald in ‘Everyday Icons’” from 2023 screens on a loop. In the video, Sherald divulges she wants viewers to “have an experience that was not about race first.” This is part of why she employs grisaille to paint her portraits of Black people. The technique, which dates to the late Medieval period when it appeared as uncolored glass frames within stained glass narratives, is taken from “gris,” the French word for gray. It was adopted by painters as a useful method for fashioning an underlying structure of an image, and for impelling the painter to pay close attention to brushwork and composition. My first experience of seeing Sherald’s show made me doubtful about her use of this tactic. I’ve endured too many silly conversations in which speakers assured me they did not “see color,” which begs the question of what I look like to them. I have long wanted to respond, “If this is true, then why have you mentioned it?” Our cultural anxieties run deep and often show up unannounced. Regardless, I have reservations about what grisaille leaves out of the frame artistically. Looking at her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,” I flashed back to the much more vibrant, assertive, even confrontational photograph of the former first lady the New York Times Style Magazine had published two years prior. Look at it. There’s a richness to her skin tone, a variation in hue and value that follows the topography of her face: her mouth gradually lightening to pink, both cheekbones rising in tone with the photographer’s light. The darkness of her eyelashes, pupils, and the edges of her hair with its lighter brown highlights contrasts with her skin to make the process of looking at her feel like a visual quest for glimpses of her interior life.Amy Sherald, “Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” (2018) in Amy Sherald: American Sublime (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)On seeing Sherald’s portrait, I felt deprived of all that visual plentitude, because her use of grisaille mostly flattens Obama in a canvas that focuses on the uniquely patterned dress. Her face is rendered in a middle gray with just the cock of her left eyebrow and the tilt of her chin to give anything away about her personality. In fact, Sherald’s style tends to flatten and reduce most of her subjects to templates for real people — not caricatures, but more like characters in a catalog of Americana. Take the painting “As American as Apple Pie” (2020), in which two figures gaze back at the viewer. The woman wears a long, pleated pink skirt; a red Barbie t-shirt; large, yellow framed glasses; and matching hoop earrings and red shoes. The man wears a dark blue denim jacket, white tee and tan jeans, and white Converse sneakers. Both are standing by what looks like a huge Cadillac convertible with whitewall tires. They recall any number of style magazines or popular films from the 1970s onward. As Sherald says in the Art21 video, “I consider myself an American realist. Edward Hopper and Andy Wyeth, they’re telling these American stories, and I’m also telling American stories.” Brava! I endorse this mission wholeheartedly. Sherald should be among these storytellers, and Black people deserve to be prominent figures in almost any American story.Visitors at Amy Sherald: American Sublime (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)But the question her painting raises is whether her quest is successful. Do most visitors to Sherald’s show, or even some of them, have an experience of responding to information besides the racial identity of the subjects? Would the exhibition even be mounted at the Whitney if she hadn’t consistently depicted Black Americans? Anecdotal evidence gathered from both my visits suggests that Black people are flocking to the show, and from what is said in the press, they do so because they can see themselves in the work. I witnessed many Black folks taking pictures with Sherald’s figures as if the family gathering were happening right there in the gallery. Though they function more like illustrations, it is still critical right now for Sherald to publicly exhibit these portraits. In fact, Sherald recently canceled an upcoming exhibition of her work at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, citing the possibility that her work would be censored. According to the New York Times, Sherald “made the decision after she said she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump.” Despite the anticipatory compliance of institutions with this administration’s anti-inclusion agenda, the arts community is being attacked by a federal administration that acts with hostility to any rendition of American history or culture that focuses on or even recognizes people of color and the contributions we’ve made. This overt, conservative movement seeks to claim the status of “real Americans” as only rightly belonging to those of White, Western European heritage. It’s not practically possible to decouple the stories of Black people from the wealth, market dominance, and military power of the nation — all the aspects that might lead someone to describe this country as “great.” One of the only reasons the nation has come within striking distance of fulfilling the promise of equality within its Declaration of Independence is the protracted struggle of the Civil Rights Movement — a movement led by Black people. Sherald fights the excision of Black people from ongoing chronicles of a nation that would look nothing like itself without African Americans.In the past decade, wave after wave of Black representational painting has declared that Black people are different from the White mainstream and no less fully human — for example, the work of Noah Davis, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Henry Taylor, Lubaina Himid, and Kerry James Marshall. Sherald is part of this current. She wants to describe a collective arena of identity to which being racialized is not the price of admission. But the hidden surcharge seems to be that we lose bits of our splendor.Amy Sherald, “Breonna Taylor” (2020) in Amy Sherald: American Sublime (photo Hyperallergic)In the Art21 video, Sherald discusses her painting of Breonna Taylor, who was gunned down in her own home by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020, thereafter becoming an icon of the precarity of Black people’s lives. Sherald shows her standing at the threshold between iconography and lived life. The painter talks about the intentional styling of Taylor as if for a magazine cover, with a gorgeous blue gown, a gleaming gold cross necklace, and an engagement ring — which follows from the painting being commissioned for the cover of the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair. “I think we deserved a whole picture of her life,” Sherald says. We do. But don’t we deserve that of others, too, those who have not achieved iconic status? If we make Black people into symbols, legends, or flattened characters, how will others recognize our humanity when it’s dark outside and the nuances of our features are lost, when someone is banging on the front door, convinced that when they come face to face with us, they won’t see race?