[Asma Naeem] We see a boxer, bare-chested, powerful, calm, sitting at the edge of a boxing ring. The ropes stretch out behind him in red, white, and blue. He wears bright red shorts and crisp white gloves. His skin, as always in Amy Sherald's work, is rendered in shades of gray, which draws our focus to the composition, to the emotion in his face, and to the extraordinary control of his body. The title "American Grit" points to more than athletic strength. It speaks to endurance and determination, but also to how boxing itself has come to symbolize American masculinity from George Bellows' early-20th-century fight scenes to Norman Rockwell's illustrations and the Portraits of Black Champions by William H. Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Artists have long turned to the boxer as an emblem of resilience, pride, and national identity. While white artists like Bellows and Rockwell drew on European and early American history painting to stage scenes of brute strength and spectacle, Black artists such as Johnson and Basquiat pictured the Black boxer to honor the dignity, vulnerability, and cultural weight of the Black athlete in American life. With "American Grit," Sherald steps into both lineages, making them her own, and what an extraordinarily rare portrait of an athlete we have before us. While Black boxers from Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali have long occupied the cultural imagination, Sherald's portrait is arguably the most profoundly moving and inspiring recasting of the boxer. Sherald's boxer isn't caught mid-punch or shown in the chaos of the ring. Instead, he rests. He meets our gaze directly, steady and assured. His body remains powerful and athletic. Yet Sherald invites us to consider how strength can take many forms. "American Grit" is about stamina and self-possession, but also about how the myths of American heroism can and should be continually reimagined through new eyes.