She has painted portraits of Michelle Obama and Brianna Taylor, but much of Amy Sherald's work is about filling in absent images of everyday Americans.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks with the artist and takes us to the first major exhibition covering her career for our arts and culture series Canvas.

They look at us. her career for our arts and culture series Canvas.

They look at us and we at them.

A young woman in a pink blouse with a bow.

A young man in stars and stripes and cowboy hat.

Paintings hung a little lower than usual,

says artist Amy Sherald directly at eye level.

My figures are present. They're not passively painted. These aren't passive portraits.

They are standing there, ready to be gazed upon, but also to gaze back at you.

And in that interaction, I think we should find our humanity in each other.

The first major survey of Cheryl's work is now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern

Art.

Some show scenes at the beach or the playground.

Most are individuals in brightly colored clothing set against equally vivid

backgrounds. Cheryl titled the exhibition American Sublime. This word sublime.

Yes, excellent. Excellence. Yes, the excellence of what it is to be an everyday American.

The people that make the world go round. All of these individuals

that are in my portraits stand up as archetypes for that because we can think about all

of the big names in the big H of history, but the little H is what really makes everything everything. We met Cheryl recently at her studio in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the river from New York.

Here she mixes her paints to concoct her own signature varieties of color.

So this is my happy place back here.

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