“I consider myself an American realist. Edward Hopper and Andy Wyeth, they’re telling these American stories, and I’m also telling American stories,” says Amy Sherald in an Art21 video at “American Sublime,” her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum. In the video, Sherald divulges that she wants viewers to “have an experience that was not about race first.” This is part of why she employs grisaille to paint her portraits of Black people. The technique, which dates to the late Medieval period when it appeared as uncolored glass frames within stained glass narratives, is taken from “gris,” the French word for gray. It was adopted by painters as a useful method for fashioning an underlying structure of an image, and for impelling the painter to pay close attention to brushwork and composition. But Sherald’s paintings raise the question: Is her quest successful? Upon visiting the Whitney, Seph Rodney (sephsees) wonders: “Do most visitors to Sherald’s show — or even some of them — h...