Trans Art Under Attack
TransLash Podcast with Imara Jones
TransLash Media
4.3 • 619 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we explore the controversy surrounding Amy Sherald’s painting Trans Forming Liberty, which depicts a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty.
In the summer of 2025, Amy Sherald canceled her highly anticipated and historic exhibition, American Sublime, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after Sherald said she faced pressure from museum officials to remove Trans Forming Liberty and show a video of it instead.
Rather than compromise, Sherald pulled the show and brought American Sublime to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it became the museum’s most attended exhibition since 2000, drawing more than 80,000 visitors.
Explaining her decision, Sherald said, “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility, and I was opposed to that being a part of the American Sublime narrative.”
First, we hear from Grace Byron, an art critic who wrote about the chilling effect of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders on trans artists in a piece for the New Yorker called “The War on Trans Art.”
Then, we hear from the model depicted in Trans Forming Liberty, Arewà Basit, who is also an artist herself.
This week’s Trans Joy features Gericault De La Rose, a Chicago-based artist.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, fam, it's me, Amara. |
| 0:11.2 | Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives. |
| 0:34.4 | Well, today we're talking about the world of trans art, and it spurred by the opening this week in Atlanta of the iconic artist Amy Sherald's work, American Sublime, after a successful showing at the Boston Museum of Art. |
| 0:39.4 | Now, some of you might wonder what a show by Amy Sherald, who is not trans, |
| 0:46.1 | has to do with the world of trans art, but it's not the artist that's the issue here, but who she chose to represent. You see, Cheryl, who painted the official portrait of Michelle Obama, |
| 0:51.8 | was on the verge of becoming the first black person |
| 0:55.4 | to have a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. But that opportunity |
| 1:00.8 | disappeared because she painted a trans woman as the Statue of Liberty in the American |
| 1:06.4 | Sublime Show and refused to take it out despite threats from the Trump administration. |
| 1:13.3 | And so Cheryl literally decided to take her show on the road. |
| 1:18.5 | That's why this is the perfect opportunity to take a harder look into the controversy |
| 1:22.8 | surrounding Amy Sherald and what it says about trans erasure in the art world. |
| 1:29.5 | First, we hear from Grace Byron, a writer and art critic who tackled what's going on with |
| 1:34.9 | Amy Sherald in a piece for the New Yorker called The War on Trans Art. |
| 1:40.6 | Censorship is something that can very quickly multiply. |
| 1:46.3 | And so if you sort of let one thing be censored, |
| 1:49.0 | it's like what else is going to get censored very quickly. |
| 1:54.4 | Then we're speaking with the model depicted in Amy Sherald's work, a Rueb Hasette, |
| 1:59.4 | about what it's like to be in the middle of this storm as an artist herself. |
| 2:05.6 | She is an unwavering person when it comes to, I feel, process and not wanting to compromise. |
| 2:09.6 | And I cherish that quality, and I have always cherished that quality. |
| 2:15.6 | But before we get into it, let's start out as always with some trans joy. |
... |
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