It has been Amy Sherald’s fate to be known for one painting only. Her portrait of Michelle Obama, commissioned in 2018 by the National Portrait Gallery, brought the artist overnight fame. Ignoring the conventions of academic portraiture, a genre associated with pale men standing in front of burgundy drapes, Sherald liberated America’s first lady from the fusty, cigar-brown rooms of the past. Obama, dressed in a sleeveless gown, leans forward in her chair, channeling Rodin’s “Thinker.” The background, a featureless expanse of powder blue, suggests fresh air.

The painting is an anomaly in Sherald’s oeuvre. “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” a compact and rousing retrospective of 42 paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, brings us the work of an artist who is not primarily a recorder of first ladies or famous faces. Rather, Sherald is a painter of one-frame short stories, of fictions that bestow recognition on people you would not recognize. She can be preachy, but her paintings are saved from sentimentality by an unerring sense of geometric design and a taste for spare, simplified, super-flat planes.

Stepping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the museum, you find yourself contemplating a curved, rather amazing wall hung with five life-size portraits, each in a different sizzling color. “The Girl Next Door” (2019), my favorite, shows a young woman in a white polka-dot dress, silhouetted against an emerald green background. Compared with the effortlessly attractive girl-next-door we know from countless films, Sherald has painted a touchingly awkward woman, her red leather belt rising up from her waist to her chest. But you can see that she is trying to look her best. Her immaculate dress, her red lipstick, her fixed-up hair with its attractive side part, are careful efforts at self-presentation that speak volumes about American girlhood.

Amy Sherald, “The Girl Next Door,” 2019, oil on canvas.Credit…via Amy Sherald and Hauser Wirth; Photo by Joseph Hyde

Sherald, who is 51, composes her scenes with extreme deliberation. She picks out models for her paintings and outfits them with costumes and props. She photographs them and works from her reference photographs to situate Black faces and figures into roles and settings complete with suburban lawns, white picket fences and other nostalgic symbols of American plenty.

Here is a world in which it is usually summer, and days are squinty bright and shadowless. “I’m an escapist,” Sherald once said in an interview. “I love the Teletubbies — the idea of grass with no bugs makes me happy.”