Her donation to an ‘Artists for Kamala’ benefit auction might have been in vain, but the Democratic Party’s favourite artist is quickly being inaugurated as a cultural figurehead of liberal USA – and a leading proponent of Black figurative painting. Sherald found fame with her 2018 official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, and now almost 50 of the painter’s portraits, dating from 2007 to today, of Black figures shown at leisure, in love or modelling bright, exuberant clothes, form American Sublime, a retrospective that opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art in November. In 2025 the show travels to the Whitney in New York and finally to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, where Sherald will be the first Black female artist to present a solo exhibition. ‘Figuration is important because it’s a definite mark and a stamp that I was here, in a narrative that was absent of our presence,’ Sherald told Harper’s Bazaar. That presence can be felt in the numerous US and UK group shows she appeared in too, including The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at London’s National Portrait Gallery.