Artist Amy Sherald, whose work is the focus of a blockbuster exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, has been named one of Time Magazine’s Women of the Year for 2026. Sherald is one of 16 women on the prestigious Time list, announced this week. It’s the latest of numerous honors and awar ds that the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) graduate has received over the past year, including an “Artist Who Inspires” award from the BMA; the “Ally for Equality Award” from the Human Rights Campaign and an Anderson Cooper profile on “60 Minutes.” Sherald’s inclusion on Time’s list is likely to add to the already-strong public interest in the artist and her “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” exhibit, which has broken attendance records at the BMA, where it opened Nov. 2 and is view until April 5. How the exhibit came to Baltimore, when the BMA wasn’t originally scheduled as a stop, is explained in Time’s article. At the start of this week, museum officials posted on the BMA’s website that Sherald’s show was sold out, even though it had six weeks to go. On Wednesday, they announced that the museum was making roughly 5,400 additional tickets available, in response to “unprecedented demand.” As of mid-week, they said, 72,612, people had attended or reserved tickets for the exhibit. Before American Sublime, the BMA exhibit that had the highest attendance since 2000 was the Matisse/Diebenkorn show, which drew about 45,700 visitors in 2016 and 2017. “The Beauty in Everyday Americans’ Sherald is the only woman on Time’s list who works primarily as a visual artist. She is represented by Hauser Wirth, a leading gallery, and recently signed with the talent agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which is adding more visual artists to its client roster. Other women on Time’s Women of the Year list include: actresses Teyana Taylor, Mariska Hargitay, Lucy Liu and Sheryl Lee Ralph; director Chloé Zhao; singer and songwriter Brandi Carlile; track-and-field athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone; Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley; activists Reshma Saujani and Mahnoor Omer; author and podcast host Mel Robbins; physician-scientist Reshma Kewalramani; Sierra Leone midwife Isata Dumbuya; educator Safeena Husain; and Ulta Beauty President and CEO Kecia Steelman. “At a moment when global progress demands bold and decisive action, the 2026 Women of the Year remind us that individual leadership remains one of the most powerful catalysts for change,” Time CEO Jessica Sibley said in a statement about the issue. “Honored to be among 16 women whose work insists on a more expansive future,” Sherald posted on Instagram. View this post on Instagram The Time article, by Erin McMullen, is titled: “Amy Sherald Sees the Beauty in Everyday Americans.” “Sherald, 52, is perhaps best known for her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama, but the Georgia-born artist most often paints everyday people: a woman with a camera, a man in a cowboy hat, a child on the slide,” McMullen writes. “’I’m drawn to expressions of humanity,’” [Sherald] says. “‘I want [viewers] to think about who these people are, what it’s like to interact with them, what stories they might be telling.’” “Not willing to compromise’ National Portrait Gallery representatives expressed reservations about showing one of artist Amy Sherald’s paintings, “Trans Forming Liberty,” which depicted the Statue of Liberty as a trans woman. Artwork by Amy Sherald. American Sublime is a mid-career retrospective that was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from Nov. 16, 2024, to March 9, 2025, and moved to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art from April 9 to Aug. 10 of 2025. The most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, it includes more than three dozen paintings from 2007 to 2024. The exhibit was scheduled to appear at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C. starting last Sept. 19 and to remain on view until Feb. 22, 2026. Sherald would have been the first contemporary Black artist to receive a solo exhibition there. But Sherald cancelled the National Portrait Gallery stop due to concerns about censorship involving one of her paintings, Trans Forming Liberty, which depicts Black trans model and performance artist Arewa Basit posing as the Statue of Liberty. Instead, she brought her retrospective to the BMA. “There are just some things that I’m not willing to compromise on,” Time quotes her as saying. Sherald refers to the unscheduled stop in Baltimore, where she attended MICA and stayed afterwards to live and work, as “a wonderful homecoming.” More tickets To enable more people to see the exhibit, the BMA made additional timed-entry tickets available first to BMA members for 24 hours from 5 p.m. Wednesday to 4:59 p.m. Thursday. Tickets were then made available to the general public beginning at 5 p.m. Thursday, with a limit of four tickets per order. As of Friday morning, “A limited number of additional tickets are now available for the general public to see this sold out exhibition,” the museum’s website states. After the show ends in Baltimore, it will be on view at its fourth and final stop, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, from May 15 to Sept. 27. Could Sherald’s show come back to the BMA after it ends in Atlanta? According to BMA Senior Director of Communications Anne Brown, returning the show to the BMA is unlikely because many of the works are on loan for the traveling exhibit, and the lenders have agreed to make them available only for a limited time. Could the BMA have welcomed more people if American Sublime had been mounted in the museum’s high-ceilinged Thalheimer Galleries, which have a greater capacity? While the Thalheimer Galleries are designed to accommodate more people, officials say, the second floor of the museum’s Contemporary Wing was deemed to be better suited to the size and scope of Sherald’s show and the scale of her paintings. More information about American Sublime is available at artbma.org. ...read more read less