Controversy over an Amy Sherald painting of the Statue of Liberty reveals divides over US national symbols, joining debates that have centred on the statue since it was first unveiled.

So fixed is our focus on the radiant points of her spiky crown and the upward thrust of her flickering lamp, it is easy to miss altogether the shackles of human enslavement that Lady Liberty – who is at the centre of a fresh skirmish in the US's accelerating culture wars – is busy trampling underfoot. Her meaning contains multitudes. It pulls her in many directions.

Messily inspired, as all great art is, by a mixture of sources – from the Roman goddess Libertas, to the Greek sun god Helios, to the multifaceted Egyptian goddess Isis (who fascinated the sculpture's creator, the French artist Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi) – the Statue of Liberty seems hardwired for debate. She boldly embodies the one straightforward truth about cultural symbols: their truths are never straightforward.

The current controversy over the essence of Bartholdi's 46m (151ft)-tall copper sculpture, ingeniously engineered by Gustave Eiffel and formally presented to the United States as a gift from France on 4 July 1884, is a striking painting by African American contemporary artist Amy Sherald that reimagines the Statue of Liberty as a black transgender woman.

Earlier this month, Sherald, best known until now for her 2018 official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, was advised that her work, Trans Forming Liberty, might upset US President Donald Trump – who in January issued an Executive Order recognising two sexes only – male and female – and therefore should not be included in her upcoming exhibition at the federally funded Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Rather than contemplate removing the work, Sherald decided to cancel the show altogether, citing "a culture of censorship".

The contested work is currently on display at New York's Whitney Museum as part of Sherald's touring exhibition American Sublime and is characteristic of the artist's instinct to dislocate her subjects and unsettle expectations. Sherald often achieves this, as she does both in her portrait of Obama and in Trans Forming Liberty, by translating her subjects' complexions into an uncanny greyscale (or "grisaille"), nudging viewers to look past skin colour and reassess their assumptions about what constitutes race. The model for Sherald's work, Arewà Basit, a black artist who identifies as non-binary trans-femme, is portrayed against a flat, periwinkle background, hand on hips, wearing a vibrant ultramarine gown that recalls the otherworldly resplendence of Renaissance Madonnas, and neon fuschia hair.

The torch she lifts has been supplanted by a clutch of humble Gerbera daisies,........

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