Directors at the Baltimore Museum of Art are expecting to break attendance records when their blockbuster exhibit, Amy Sherald: American Sublime, opens on Sunday for a five-month run.
But they may have broken one record already – the record for the shortest amount of time between landing a major show and opening it to the public.
During a media preview this week, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director Asma Naeem said a large exhibit such as American Sublime typically takes months if not years to plan, but that wasn’t the case with American Sublime.
“This exhibit was unexpected, as you know,” Naeem said. “It came together not in two years. Not in three years. Not in four years, but two months. We had to condense everything into two months.”
During the preview, Naeem talked at length about how quickly the Baltimore exhibit came together and what the museum did to land it after the artist decided to cancel a previously-scheduled stop at the National Portrait Gallery.
The show was originally set to appear in three locations: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in the spring of 2025 and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C., starting in September.
On July 24, word got out that Sherald cancelled her show in Washington due to concerns about censorship on the part of the National Portrait Gallery. Curators had expressed reservations about including one of her paintings, “Trans Forming Liberty,” which depicts the Statue of Liberty as a Black trans woman.
Naeem picked up the timeline from there:
“Here is the inside story,” she said. “As soon as we collectively heard on the news that Amy had cancelled her show at the National Portrait Gallery, I sent Amy a text and I said, ‘If we can move mountains to make this show happen here, we will do it.’ “
Within minutes of the news breaking, Naeem said, “I started to get texts from some of you [in the press and museum colleagues]. I started to get calls coming in saying: Are we doing it? Are we doing it? Within minutes. That is how immediately and positively all of us here knew that we had to take on the show.”
Time was of the essence because a certain period had been blocked out for the show at the National Portrait Gallery – Sept. 19, 2025 to Feb. 22, 2026. In order to be competitive, Baltimore had to essentially match the same period as the cancelled Washington show.
Leaders of other museums made the same pitch, including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the state where Sherald was born. Ultimately, Sherald said yes to the Baltimore Museum of Art, and directors announced on Sept. 3 that her exhibit had a new home in Baltimore. That’s when the clock really started ticking. (Sherald has since made arrangements to bring her exhibit to the High Museum as a fourth stop, from May 15 to Sept. 27, 2026.)
The schedule for the Baltimore exhibit calls for it to run from Nov. 2 to April 5, 2025. That gave the BMA exactly two months from the Sept. 3 announcement to opening day in Baltimore – even less counting member and press preview dates.
As displayed on the second floor of the museum’s Contemporary Wing, the Baltimore exhibit contains 38 paintings in all, down from 48 that were on view in San Francisco. Unlike the situation in Washington, the artist was fully involved in determining what’s being shown in Baltimore and what isn’t. And here’s a telling statistic: Of the 38 paintings on view at the BMA, 23 were made in Baltimore and 18 were both made in Baltimore and feature models from Baltimore.
At the press preview, Naeem predicted that this will be the biggest show in the museum’s history in terms of attendance, in part because of the artist’s many connections with Baltimore:
“We’re expecting all records to be smashed, because everyone loves Amy,” she said. “Who doesn’t love Amy Sherald?”
One twist that shows more than a little prescience on Sherald’s part: If she had kept her show in Washington, no one would be able to see it right now because the National Portrait Gallery and other Smithsonian museums are currently closed due to the federal government shutdown. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, by contrast, the doors to her show are just about to open.
“It took a lot of work to make something that usually happens over many months happen in a matter of minutes, but we did it,” Naeem said. “And the reason we did it is because Amy’s work deserves to be seen by Baltimoreans. She has loved this city with every inch of her heart and we want to show her our love back.”
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