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photograph by Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
A Midsummer Afternoon Dream paints a serene scene that stirs a longing for a bicycle ride through the country. It is part of Georgia native Amy Sherald’s exhibition American Sublime, which runs from May 15 to September 27 at the High Museum of Art. The exhibition features over 50 works, including her renowned official presidential portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama.
Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, and attended Clark Atlanta University, initially on a premedicine track. She cross-enrolled in an art class at Spelman College her sophomore year and ultimately pursued a degree in painting, graduating in 1997.
Sherald rose to prominence when she won the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). The work features a young Black woman painted in grisaille technique, in which skin tones are painted in gray; Sherald uses it to challenge perceptions of race. In 2018, the High Museum recognized Sherald’s work by awarding her the annual David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History.
American Sublime debuted in 2024 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Baltimore Museum of Art. Last summer, the exhibition became a cultural flash point when Sherald canceled its planned showing at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She did so after the museum objected to her painting Trans Forming Liberty, which modeled the Statue of Liberty after a transgender artist. The High collaborated with Sherald to display the uncensored exhibition.
“Returning to Atlanta with American Sublime feels less like an arrival,” Sherald says, “and more like continuing a conversation in a place that first taught me how to become an artist.”
Sherald designed the Atlanta showing with Angelica Arbelaez, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the High, and it begins with her early work.
“We wanted to show how her Georgia upbringing shaped how she thinks about race and what American identity is,” Arbelaez says. “In a way, Georgia and the South are everywhere in the show.”
Sherald painted A Midsummer Afternoon Dream in 2020 with her grisaille technique to juxtapose against the backdrop. There are autobiographical nods, such as the dog modeled after Sherald’s dog, George, along with Americana symbols in the surroundings that her subject inhabits.
“Some of Amy’s references can be overt and undeniable, and this painting is a way to say that this leisure is aspirational for anyone,” Arbelaez says. “And she doesn’t shy away from beauty.”
This article appears in our July 2026 issue.
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