Photo By Gail

In her most recent paintings, Amy Sherald has responded directly to the  increasing threats, violence, and legislation against gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people across the United States. This work, Trans Forming Liberty (2024) recasts the Statue of Liberty as a non-binary trans-femme person, radically redefining this iconic symbol of American freedom, and suggesting that the ideal of acceptance inscribed on the sculpture – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” from Emma Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus (1883) – be applied unequivocally to all citizens, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or other identifiers.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum in New York.