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It's hard to resist staring back at paintings by artist Amy Sherald, now on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Sherald is best known for her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, but the exhibit gives a more complete look at her palette. "That painting is here in the show, and we're very happy to be able to share it with visitors here," said co-curator Rujeko Hockley. "But we really wanted to show the progression of her work as an artist.

"Amy often paints the skin tone of her subjects, who are Black people, in what we call grisaille, or gray tone," said Hockley. "It kind of disrupts this immediate identification, perhaps even stereotyping that all of us are, you know, subject to."

It's not the only way to spot a Sherald painting. Hockley said one characteristic of the artist's work is her subjects' body language: "Very kind of solid, confident, not over-confident, but just really certain and still in [themselves]."

The Sherald exhibition, said Hockley, is "a show that is really speaking to kind of overwhelmingly positive sense of connection, and kind of shared humanity, and kind of beauty that comes from being around one another, that comes from kind of seeing the humanity in another."

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But if you can't make it to New York, there are plenty of exhibits to visit this summer.

Beloved impressionist works are on display at museums in Boston and Portland, Oregon.

Major contemporary artists are featured, too, from KAWS in Bentonville, Arkansas, to Jeffrey Gibson in Los Angeles.

And, in Cleveland, things are looking especially bright thanks to the works of Takashi Murakami … one of the many exhibits giving us reason to smile this summer.

      
Story produced by Julie Kracov and Sara Kugel. Editor: George Pozderec.