Kehinde Wiley, born on February 28, 1977, is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is renowned for his naturalistic paintings of Black subjects, which often reference the works of Old Masters.
Kehinde Wiley at the opening of the "Trick of the Eye" exhibition at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (Moscow, 2019)
Early Life and Education
Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1977. His father, Isaiah D. Obot, is Ibibio, from Nigeria, and his mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, is African American. As a child, Wiley's mother enrolled him and his siblings in art classes after school with the aim of keeping them engaged in constructive activities.
At age 11, Wiley and his brother were selected, along with 48 other children, to study briefly at an art conservatory near St. Petersburg, Russia. There, Wiley developed a strong interest in portraiture. Wiley has said that his brother was better at portraiture than he was, which fueled a sense of friendly competition between them. Wiley's father, Isaiah, was a Nigerian student who came to the US on scholarship.
In 1999, Wiley earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He received a scholarship to attend the Yale University School of Art, and completed an MFA in 2001.
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Artistic Development and Style
The beginnings of Wiley's portraits can be traced back to his time in Harlem during a residency at the Studio Museum. Though Wiley's early portraits were based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, he later expanded his sources and references internationally, drawing from urban centers including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar, and Rio de Janeiro. This resulting body of work became known as The World Stage. Models wore everyday clothing and assumed poses drawn from artwork in their location's history.
Wiley often references Old Masters paintings for the pose of a figure. Rendering figures realistically while citing specific Old Master works, Wiley fuses 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.
In a number of his paintings, Wiley inserts Black protagonists into Old Master paintings. Similarly, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) is based on Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800) by Jacques-Louis David. 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." While creating the work, Wiley attempted to use live horses and found the proportions between rider and horse in the original to be unrealistic. The purpose of art during David's time was to serve as propaganda.
Although seemingly naturalistic, both Wiley's and David's portraits feature rider's who are disproportionate to their steed, because "men look a lot smaller on real horses." Wiley has said he is drawn to, and also seeks to expose, the illusionism of Old Master painting: "The appeal, I suppose, is that, in a world so unmasterable and so unknowable, you give the illusion or veneer of the rational, of order-these strong men, these powerful purveyors of truth."
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Wiley's portraits are based on men he encounters, including on Harlem's 125th Street and in South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was born. Wearing everyday clothing, models are asked to assume poses from paintings by Renaissance masters, such as Titian and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Wiley sometimes changes the gender of figures portrayed in earlier works. In Portrait of a Couple (2012), he replaces a 1610 heterosexual couple with two young men.
The same year, he exhibited two variations on the Judith Beheading Holofernes Biblical story famously painted by Caravaggio, replacing the male Holofernes with female figures. New York magazine described one of these as depicting "a tall, elegant black woman in a long blue dress. In one hand, she holds a knife."
Much of Wiley's work focuses on male figures, a choice he has linked to the relative absence of women in historical portraiture. The way he positions and paints his figures has been described as inverting conventional masculine and feminine social norms. He emphasizes features in ways traditionally applied to women, includes motifs such as sperm that reference vitality, and sometimes places figures in vulnerable poses. The floral and decorative backgrounds further complicate the idea of masculinity.
Wiley has stated that his ornate portraits were intended to reimage depictions of Black men in art. Poses adapted from classical paintings are used to comment on historical power dynamics between African American men and white men. In these reworks on 18th-century compositions featuring modern Black subjects, the subjects assume positions of status and regard.
Wiley’s paintings have been described as presenting figures as worthy of attention, rather than as background or subordinate elements, and as offering alternatives to certain media portrayals. Wiley's portraits are known for their bright, intricate backgrounds that are purposefully different from the portraits they are based on.
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Kehinde Wiley: Revolutionizing Portraiture
Notable Works and Recognition
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 the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery "America's Presidents" exhibition. Amy Sherald was simultaneously chosen by Michelle Obama for the First Lady portrait.
After visiting Richmond, Virginia, Wiley revisited the idea in response to Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue and the idea of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy existing within a modern "hipster" town. Wiley create Rumors of War, a 30-foot-tall statue of a young Black man in jeans, Nike high-tops and dreadlocks, modeled on the J. E. B. Stuart monument. The work was unveiled in Times Square before being moved to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, roughly a mile away from the J. E. B.
Rumors of War, Kehinde Wiley, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
In 2021, Wiley's Go became a permanent installation in the concourse of New York City's Penn Station. Saint Adelaide (2014) is a stained-glass window designed by Wiley.
In October 2011, Wiley received the Artist of the Year Award from the New York City Art Teachers Association/United Federation of Teachers. 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.
Controversies
Wiley opened a studio in Beijing, China in 2006, initially to reduce costs by employing assistants for some brushwork; by 2012, he said lower costs were no longer the reason. Some critics have questioned the extent to which Wiley's paintings are painted by Wiley himself; when asked about visiting his Beijing studio to watch him paint, he declined. The studio is managed by Ain Cocke, who has worked for Wiley for nearly a decade, first as a painting assistant and now as a manager.
In May 2024, Wiley was accused of sexual assault by artist Joseph Awuah-Darko, who said that Wiley had assaulted him twice in June 2021 during and after a dinner event in Ghana. Awuah-Darko said he was first "inappropriately groped" shortly after meeting Wiley, and that a "much more severe and violent" assault occurred later that day.
Personal Life
Wiley has identified as a gay man. He has said that his sexuality "is not black and white. I am a gay man who has drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there.
Exhibitions
- 2018 October 19 - February 10, 2019: Kehinde Wiley at St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Museum of Fine Arts in St. Saint Louis Art Museum in St.
