Amy Sherald’s “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)”

The artist Amy Sherald is known for her stirring portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, and often uses grayscale to complicate representations of race in portraiture. In Sherald’s first cover for the magazine, for the March 24, 2025, issue, the woman is rendered in Sherald’s signature style but the viewer’s eye is initially drawn to a large tea cup in the foreground. Sherald also likes to incorporate props and costumes to expand her narratives into fantastical territories; she cites Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as her source of inspiration for this piece. “American Sublime,” her first solo museum exhibition in New York, will open at the Whitney on April 9th.

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