Kehinde Wiley


Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of Black people. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which has portraits of all the U.S. presidents. The Columbus Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007, describes his work as follows: "Wiley has gained recent acclaim for his heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
Wiley's portrait of Obama was unveiled on February 12, 2018. He and Amy Sherald, whose portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama was simultaneously unveiled, are the first black artists to paint official portraits of the president or First Lady for the National Portrait Gallery.
Some observers criticized the selection of Wiley for the commission because he had earlier produced two painting variations of Judith Beheading Holofernes, in which he depicts African-American women holding the severed heads of white women. Wiley said that this is a "play on the 'kill whitey' thing".

Early life and education

Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California. His father is a Yoruba from Nigeria, and his mother is African American. Wiley has a twin brother. When Wiley was a child, his mother supported his interest in art and enrolled him in after-school art classes. At the age of 11, he spent a short time at an art school in Russia. He continued with other classes in the US.
The twins were raised by their mother; their father had returned to Nigeria. Wiley traveled to Nigeria at the age of 20 to meet his father and explore his family roots there. Wiley earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University, School of Art in 2001. Wiley became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Career

Wiley often references Old Masters paintings for the pose of a figure. Wiley's paintings often blur the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Rendering his figures in a realistic mode—while making references to specific Old Master paintings—Wiley creates a fusion of period styles and influences, ranging from French Rococo, Islamic architecture, and West African textile design, to urban hip hop and the "Sea Foam Green" of a Martha Stewart Interiors color swatch. Wiley depicts his slightly larger than life-size figures in a heroic manner, giving them poses that connote power and spiritual awakening. Wiley's portrayal of masculinity is filtered through these poses of power and spirituality. Wiley's Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps is based on Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, often regarded as a "masterpiece." Wiley restaged it with an African rider wearing modern army fatigues and a bandanna. Wiley "investigates the perception of blackness and creates a contemporary hybrid Olympus in which tradition is invested with a new street credibility".
His portraits are based on photographs of young men whom Wiley sees on the street. He has painted men from Harlem's 125th Street, as well as the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was born. Dressed in street clothes, his models were asked to assume poses from the paintings of Renaissance masters, such as Tiziano Vecellio and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Wiley describes his approach as "interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit". His figurative paintings "quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of power". In this manner, his paintings fuse history and style in a unique and contemporary manner. His art has been described as having homoerotic qualities. Wiley has used a sperm motif as symbolic of masculinity and gender.
Wiley had a retrospective in 2016 at the Seattle Art Museum. In May 2017, he had an exhibit, Trickster, at the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City. The exhibit featured 11 paintings depicting contemporary black artists.
Wiley opened a studio in Beijing, China, in 2006 to use several helpers to do brushstrokes for his paintings. Initially, outsourcing work to China had been done to cut costs but by 2012, Wiley told New York magazine that low costs was no longer the reason. Critics have long wondered about the extent to which Wiley’s paintings are painted by Wiley himself. When asked if one could visit his studio in China to watch him paint, the artist has declined. Wiley’s Beijing studio is managed by Ain Cocke, who has worked for him for close to a decade, first as a painting assistant and now as a manager. He is an accomplished painter though far less successful commercially.
After visiting Richmond, Virginia, Wiley became interested in the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue and the idea of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy existing within a modern "hipster" town. In response to the monuments, Wiley decided to create Rumors of War, a thirty foot tall statue of a young, black man modeled on Monument Avenue's statue of J. E. B. Stuart. Rumors of War was unveiled in Times Square before being moved to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a mile away from the J. E. B. Stuart statue which inspired it.

"Kill whitey" paintings

In 2012, Wiley, who is known for painting men, exhibited work in Beijing including multiple paintings of women. New York magazine described his variation of Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes, which Wiley titled Judith and Holofernes, as standing out among the others. It described the painting as showing "a tall, elegant black woman in a long blue dress. In one hand, she holds a knife. In the other, a cleanly severed brunette female head". Wiley said about his work: "It's sort of a play on the 'kill whitey' thing". Wiley exhibited a second similar painting, also in 2012, entitled Judith Beheading Holofernes, featuring a black woman in a yellow dress, holding a knife in one hand and a white female severed head in the other. The paintings are based on the Biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes, a story of a Jewish woman beheading a male enemy general. Wiley portrayed Judith as a modern-day black woman and the beheading victim as a white woman.

Barack Obama presidential portrait

In October 2017, it was announced that Wiley had been chosen by Barack Obama to paint an official portrait of the former president to appear in Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery "America's Presidents" exhibition along with Amy Sherald who has been chosen Michelle Obama for the First Lady portrait on the same day, both will be the first black artist to paint an American President portrait and the First Lady portrait. Wiley painted the portrait of President Barack Obama which took him over two years from the first conversation about the commission to the unveiling which took place on February 12, 2018 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery where past president portraits have been displayed outside the White House. The painting was executed in the artists' studio in China. Wiley has represented Barack Obama's president portrait in a unique way compared to past president portraits who are shown to have a more realistic representation of an office as a background to show their authority but Wiley has depicted Obama seated casually on an antique chair seemingly floating among foliage. Each flower points to a location which represents an event that happened in Obama's life like Chrysanthemum flower which represents Chicago where he was elected as senator and is also Chicago's state flower, African lilies which represents Kenya to show respect to Obama's father who have passed away when he was a child, and Jasmine flower from Hawaii where Obama spends most of his childhood with his grandparents. During the unveiling of Obama's portrait, Wiley has mentioned that Obama and the foreground of the plants are having a battle of, "Who gets to be the star of the show, the story or the man who inhabits that story? "which Wiley wants to show that Obama is the one who claims the spotlight of the portrait and not just his story and experiences that helped contour his life. The experiences that Obama faced is what makes him Obama, but is it up to him to use those experiences to shape what the future will look like. President Obama saw in Wiley's work that he is able to elevate an ordinary person to look like a royalty and to lift then up so that they belong as a part of American Life since he believed that politics should be about the country unfolding from the bottom up and not the other way around. Wiley also mentioned in the unveiling of Obama's portrait that he went to museums in LA and noticed that there weren't many artwork that display African American and he wanted to changed that. He hoped that one day the artworks that he creates can inspire future African American generations who look up at the museum wall and see someone that looks like them being displayed at the museum, especially the portrait of the first black American president. After the unveiling of Wiley's President Obama's portrait and Amy Sherald's portrait of the First Lady, the Smithsonian National museum saw an increase in the number of visitors from 1.1 to 2.1 million people.

''Rumors of War''

In September 2019, in Times Square in New York City, Wiley unveiled his Rumors of War, a monumental equestrian statue of an anonymous young African-American man created in response to similar statues of high-ranking Confederate Army brass which still stand in the United States despite persistent calls for their removal. After the work's installation in Times Square it traveled to its permanent home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, the art institution which commissioned the statue. At 27 feet high and 16 feet wide, it is his largest work to date.

Recognition and honors

In October 2011, Wiley received the Artist of the Year Award from the New York City Art Teachers Association/United Federation of Teachers. He also received Canteen Magazines Artist of the Year Award. Two of Wiley's paintings were featured on the top of 500 New York City taxi cabs in early 2011 as a collaboration with the Art Production Fund.
Wiley is featured in a commercial on the USA as a 2010 Character Honoree.
Puma AG commissioned Wiley to paint four portraits of prominent African soccer players. Patterns from his paintings were incorporated into Puma athletic gear. The complete series, Legends of Unity: World Cup 2010, was exhibited in early 2010 at Deitch Projects in New York City.
His work was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Recognize exhibit in 2008. Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, was a retrospective at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in the summer of 2016. It displayed nearly 60 of his paintings and sculptures.

Personal life

Wiley has kept his personal life private but acknowledges that he identifies as a gay man. Between 2014 and 2018, he created Black Rock Senegal in Yoff, an artist residence designed by Senegalese architect Abib Djenne.

Selected solo exhibitions