The 2024 painting Trans Forming Liberty is typical of Sherald’s mesmeric portraiture. A Black woman, who we can identify as trans from the title, is painted in flat brushstrokes, hand on hip and a bare leg slipping from a shoulderless shimmering blue dress. She has a shock of pink hair and, in the place of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, holds a bunch of daisies. The work, a comment on visibility and freedom, full of warmth and personality, was deemed too controversial for a touring show stopping at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in September. Fearful of a review by the White House, the institution suggested placing the work in conversation with a video of people discussing transgender issues from multiple perspectives; instead Sherald cancelled the show and catalysed an avalanche of commentary on President Trump’s censorial second term. The work had already been part of the touring retrospective American Sublime, shown at SFMoMA last year, and at the Whitney in New York from April this year, and is currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Meanwhile, this year her work was part of exhibitions in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Portland Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art and New York’s Morgan Library. Sherald’s presence outside the US was more limited, featuring at Bozar and Liljevalchs, as part of the Brussels and Stockholm legs of the landmark touring show of Black portraiture When We See Us. American Sublime continues on to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art next year. ‘When a government starts deciding which stories museums can tell,’ Sherald wrote for MSNBC, ‘it is not protecting history. It is rewriting it.’ Sherald accepted the Human Rights Campaign’s Ally for Equality Award in September. But Sherald’s choice not to exhibit at the national institution was just as much a statement of her position as America’s foremost portrait artist, and that withdrawal can be a useful tactic alongside her own practice of representation.