photo from Kehinde Wiley website
Kehinde Wiley is known for creating portrait and other visual art that interrupts, disturbs, blurs, and – as described on his website – awakens “complex issues that many would prefer remain mute.”
Wiley paints young, contemporary black men and women in a classical portrait style used in the late 1800s and early 1900s for capturing white aristocrats. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Artist Project, Wiley says:
“My work and (John Singer) Sargent’s intersect with some of the problematics surrounding class. In his day, he was commissioned to make portraits by some of the most celebrated families in the world… Let’s not doubt that these are high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers… it’s about painting convincing us about our undeniable place in the world. There’s a power relationship here. You’re standing in front of this gorgeous woman at this insanely large scale. Where would you be if you were in that room? You’re on your knees…
Generally, I enjoy painting the powerless much more than the powerful… The cruel indifference of history itself has to be echoed in the enterprise of painting. Strange history in which so many people who are black and brown don’t happen to people the great museums throughout the world. My work is not about opining, it’s not about looking at the past and longing for that to be something different. I’m interested in using the past in order to break open into the present day. So many people will look at a simple portrait like this and they’ll say, ‘you’re making so much out of nothing.’ And I disagree, I think that there is a universe being pointed to here. It’s something that you can see if you’re interested in looking that way.”
His sculpture “Rumors of War” is a Confederate-style statue of a man on a horse – only instead of a Confederate soldier, it is a young, contemporary black man in jeans and a hoodie. He created it for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts “as a direct response to the Confederate statues that line Monument Avenue in Richmond.” Wiley explains in a recent interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah:
“Confederate sculptures have been haunting and terrorizing Americans for a good 50, 60 years now. Most people think these things go back to slavery; they don’t. They actually go back to as late as the 1930s and 50s. These sculptures were designed to remind African-Americans of ‘their place’ in society. And they’re still in major parts of the south…
I found several African-American men, merged all of their features, created this kind of everyman on a horse, and re-created those monuments for the 21stcentury. To create a new way of saying yes to people who happen to look like me…
That’s the power of art. We all go to museums, we all feel inspired by these images of dignity and grace. It means something when young African-Americans, kids, can go into a museum and see someone who looks like themselves. It gives a sense of ‘I belong to the conversation around power, who has it, who’s allowed to inherit that dignity.’”
Wiley made history as the first African-American artist to paint the official portrait of a U.S. president. (And, the president whose portrait he painted also made history as the United States’ first African-American president.)
He also looks at gender roles through the paintbrush. Wiley began painting his “An Economy of Grace” series (featured in a documentary by the same name) “in order to come to terms with depictions of gender and the way it is featured in art historically – a means to broaden the conversation. Any consideration of male power in painting naturally includes the presence of women within that dialogue.”
Talking about his work “A New Republic” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Wiley tells us, “In my work, I try to slow down and see individuals. What does it look like to be graceful, what does it look like to be proud, noble. I’m standing on the shoulders of all of those artists who came before me. But here there’s a space for a new way of seeing.”
Learn more about Kehinde Wiley at his website or Instagram
Curated & written by The Circle’s Creative Director & Editor, Lara Herscovitch (Cohort 10). To reach Lara directly: thecircle@clpnewhaven.org or Lara@LaraHerscovitch.com