# data[].attributes.body
President Obama's official portrait for the National Gallery of Art.

Copyright: Kehinde Wiley
Image Source: Washington Post

# data[].attributes.body
Washington Post biography and additional information on his artwork including his official portrait of former President Obama.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Before he unveiled the official portrait of former president Barack Obama on Monday, artist Kehinde Wiley was already widely popular in the contemporary art world.

Over the previous two decades, the Los Angeles-raised and New York City-based artist became known for his larger-than-life canvasses showing contemporary African Americans within centuries-old trappings of power and status. Many of his highly sought-after works, which sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, evoke Old Master paintings.

He's also become known for his process of basing portraits off photographs of everyday people he meets on city streets around the world. It's a method he first started using in Harlem, where these amateur models would choose classical images as inspiration for the resulting portraits.

In "Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps," we see a young man wearing a white bandanna, Army fatigues and Timberland boots while also wearing a cape and riding a horse - just like the 1801 Jacques-Louis David portrait of the French leader.

Wiley has also painted several celebrities. Michael Jackson commissioned a portrait, and the resulting 2010 "Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson)" shows the King of Pop in a regal uniform.

In 2005, VHI commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of famous musicians for its Hip Hop Honors program, and several of those portraits ended up in a 2008 National Portrait Gallery exhibit about hip-hop culture. His portrait of LL Cool J evoked John D. Rockefeller, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were reimagined as a company of 17th-century Dutch city guards.
[The Obamas' portraits are not what you'd expect and that's why they're great]
"So much of my work has not been fully investigated," he told HuffPost in 2017. "Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside."

The Obama portrait avoids some of the same constructions of his previous work - here, the former commander in chief is seated, not in a pose that directly references an Old Master painting, and without anachronistic accessories.

But it's clearly a Wiley. Just like how Obama's portrait has a wall of greenery and flowers, many of Wiley's previous works have repetitive, ornate and bright backgrounds, which he has called "sheer decorative devices."

"Things that come from things like wallpaper or the architectural facade ornamentation of a building," Wiley explains on his website. "In a way it robs the painting of any sense of place or location, and it's located strictly in an area of the decorative."

Wiley, one of six children, grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s and was about 11 years old when he enrolled in a small art conservatory, according to his website. He went on to attend San Francisco Art Institute, and then Yale for a master of fine arts.

In recent years, Wiley has made some departures from his signature images of men against wallpaper-like backgrounds. In 2012, he turned a focus on black women with " An Economy of Grace." And his 2017 series " Trickster " includes 11 paintings of contemporary African American artists that he has said explore the relationship between each artist and a broader community, withbackdrops depicting surrealistic, allegorical scenarios.
[Bold, provocative art that looks like money]
His career-spanning exhibition "Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic" traveled between 2015 and 2017. As Post art critic Philip Kennicott wrote, the paintings "are often distinctly homoerotic" and that "Art historical references abound, with Wiley borrowing poses and gestures from paintings by Dutch masters, Velázquez, Holbein, Manet, Landseer and Titian."

His work isn't without detractors. His huge canvasses have been criticized as formulaic and uninteresting by some. There's also the mystery that surrounds his process, including how much of his paintings are made by his assistants in his studios.

Wiley spoke to what he described as "the discomfort with a large-scale art practice" to GQ in 2013, arguing it "comes from a myth in an artistic process that never existed. Rubens, Michelangelo: Both had large studios with many assistants. There is a long line of artists who work with other artists to realize a larger vision than is possible with one hand."

He continued: "Education in art history taught me this, as did being steeped in the reality of painting. My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic. It's not romantic, but that romance never existed."
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the location of a 2008 exhibit on hip-hop culture. It was at the National Portrait Gallery, not the National Gallery of Art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who is Kehinde Wiley, the artist behind President Obama's official portrait?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Before he unveiled the official portrait of former president Barack Obama on Monday, artist Kehinde Wiley was already widely popular in the contemporary art world. Over the previous two decades, the Los Angeles-raised and New York City-based artist became known for his larger-than-life canvasses showing contemporary African Americans within centuries-old trappings of power and status.

# data[].attributes.headline
Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture

# data[].attributes.subject
Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture

# data[].attributes.body
Attributed to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute
License: CC-ND-NC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
National Portrait Gallery | RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The six artists and one poet whose work is included in RECOGNIZE! have approached hip hop culture through the lens of portraiture, and, in combination, their contributions highlight its vitality and beauty.

# data[].attributes.body
http://bit.ly/2pA9mYZ
Published: January 11, 2011
Copyright: Creativity Fuse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Los Angeles-based artist Kehinde Wiley creates portraits that feature urban men in poses from classical paintings, rendered in vibrant pop colors. Here's a brief description from his bio:

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists-including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others-Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world.

Below is a selection of his amazing paintings (the first four images) and photographs from the Black Light series that show why Wiley has developed a world-wide following.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Los Angeles-based artist Kehinde Wiley creates portraits that feature urban men in poses from classical paintings, rendered in vibrant pop colors. Here's a brief description from his bio: Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kehinde Wiley Puts a Classical Spin on His Contemporary Subjects

# data[].attributes.subject
Kehinde Wiley Puts a Classical Spin on His Contemporary Subjects

# data[].attributes.body
http://nyti.ms/2pzPV2C
Author: DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: JAN. 28, 2015
Copyright: New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Wiley painting is easy to recognize. More often than not, it shows a solitary figure, an attractive man in his 20s, enacting a scene from an old-master painting. Dressed in contemporary garb - a hooded sweatshirt, perhaps, or a Denver Broncos jersey - the man might be crossing the Swiss Alps on horseback with the brio of Napoleon or glancing upward, prophet-style, golden light encircling his head. Typically the man has a lean frame, and his clear skin gives off a coppery sheen. His posture is regal: shoulders rolled back, head turned slightly to reveal the elegant sweep of a jawline.

Every Wiley painting is a two-punch affair - the masculine figures contrast sharply with the ornately patterned, Skittles-bright backdrops unfurling behind them. Based on design sources as varied as Victorian wallpaper and Renaissance tapestries, the backgrounds can look as if thousands of curling petals had somehow been blown into geometric formations across the canvas. For the moment depicted in the painting, the men are protected and invincible, inhabiting an Arcadian realm far removed from the grit of the artist's childhood.

Mr. Wiley's champions tend to view his work in overt political terms. He redresses the absence of nonwhite faces in museum masterpieces, "using the power of images to remedy the historical invisibility of black men and women," as Eugenie Tsai, the curator of the Brooklyn Museum show, observes in the accompanying catalog.

But you can also read his work in psychological terms, and Mr. Wiley himself emphasizes the never-ending tension in the paintings between their male and female aspects. "It's about a figure in the landscape," he said of his output, adding that the backdrops symbolize the land. "For me the landscape is the irrational. Nature is the woman. Nature is the black, the brown, the other." He added, "That's the logic behind it, but everyone has their own sort of reading."

Mr. Wiley, who attended graduate art school at Yale, has a taste for academic language. During our conversation he used the words "slippage" and "surd," the last of which sent me to the dictionary. It's a math term for irrational numbers with no square root.

Surd, in truth, seems to capture something essential about Mr. Wiley, his distrust of reductive explanations. Although he has a warm manner and a winning gap-tooth smile, there is an aloofness about him, too, especially when he does not care for a question. I asked him whether he felt an affinity with the work of Chuck Close, who similarly paints portraits that disclose next to nothing about their subjects.

"He fetishizes the material process instead of an external story," he said.

What about John Currin, his fellow Yalie and devotee of brazen pastiche? "We have different projects," was Mr. Wiley's businesslike reply.

Even his sexuality, by his description, defies categorization. "My sexuality is not black and white," he said. "I'm a gay man who has occasionally drifted. I am not bi. I've had perfectly pleasant romances with women, but they weren't sustainable. My passion wasn't there. I would always be looking at guys."

Before meeting Mr. Wiley, I had seen a photograph of him in a magazine and was struck by his stylishness. He was wearing a suit whose jazzy stripes matched the background of one of his paintings. Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer who gave Mr. Wiley his first one-man show in New York and represented him for a decade, had urged me, only half-jokingly, to try to look in the artist's bedroom closet if I wanted to understand him. It contains, Mr. Deitch said, dozens of custom-made suits, many of them by Ron & Ron, a tony label founded by Haitian twins.

Mr. Wiley's studio does not look like the haunt of a dandy. You enter the building by buzzing past a steel-frame security door that opens onto a long, sunless courtyard. The heat wasn't working on the day of my visit, and the artist met me at the door bundled in layers of paint-stained work clothes. He proposed that we talk in a small front office warmed by a space heater, and night was already falling.

A fish tank glowed with blue light. Above it hung what appeared to be a Basquiat from the '80s, a smattering of cryptic words ("teeth," for instance) scratched into its brushy surface. When I complimented the painting, Mr. Wiley replied mischievously, "I painted it myself."

Clearly, he has a gift for mimicry. He can do a Velázquez. He can do a Jacques-Louis David. He can do a Basquiat. His devotion to pastiche has kept him operating on a meta level, and perhaps at a deliberate remove from his past. "The stuff I do is a type of long-form autobiography," he said, with his usual attention to paradox, "but the starting place is not me."

The artist said he never met his father during his childhood, or even saw a photograph of him. Isaiah D. Obot - a Nigerian citizen who came to the United States as a scholarship student - returned to Africa after finishing his studies. He went on to have a second family in Nigeria and a substantial career in city planning.

The artist's mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, a Texas native, studied linguistics and eventually became a teacher. Kehinde was the fifth of her six children, and a twin. For most of his childhood, he said, the family subsisted on welfare checks and whatever spare change came in from his mother's thrift shop. The store didn't have a sign or a retail space, other than a patch of sidewalk in front of the house on West Jefferson Avenue. But everyone in the neighborhood thought of it as Freddie's Store. Mr. Wiley recalls the mounds of merchandise: used books, windup Victrolas, tarnished gold-leaf picture frames, porcelain figurines of rosy-cheeked lovers.

"It was like 'Sanford and Son,' " he said, referring to the '70s sitcom about two men with a salvage shop, "junk everywhere."

The children would help their mother scout for new inventory, driving around in a Dodge van that backfired noisily. "That was the more embarrassing part," he recalled. He added, "You're 11, and you don't want to be seen jumping out to go through your neighbor's garbage. That's social death!"

At 11, everything changed. His mom enrolled him in a free art course at a state college. Suddenly, he knew how he wanted to spend his life; his career unfolded with remarkable velocity. He attended college at the San Francisco Art Institute, before winning a scholarship to Yale. He arrived in New York in 2001 as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Since then, Mr. Wiley has "street-cast" his paintings, heading out to scout for models - initially along the jammed sidewalks on 125th Street in Harlem and later, when he had enough money, overseas, in China, Israel and elsewhere.

His paintings all begin with an exchange of glances between artist and subject. Mr. Wiley describes the process as "this serendipitous thing where I am in the streets running into people who resonate with me, whether for cultural or sexual reasons. My type is rooted in my own sexual desire."

He added, with amusement, "Most people turn me down." The willing few are instructed to come to his studio to pose for photographs that serve as source material for the portraits.

Mr. Wiley delegates much of his production to a bevy of assistants, so much so that he has been accused of outsourcing his entire output. "Wiley's paintings are created by teams of assistants in China," the critic Ben Davis observed in an ulcerous review at BlouinArtinfo.com in 2012.

At the time, Mr. Wiley had declined to say much about his process, but during our meeting, he was candid about the division of labor. In general, he said, his assistants are responsible for painting the super-busy, detail-packed backgrounds. "Let's face it," he said, "I'm not doing all that."

After a background is laid in place, he starts in on the figure, the gently lit face and body, which he seems to view as the heart of his work. Rendering skin tones, especially black and brown ones, is a subtle process, and, if you look closely at a patch of cheek or forehead in his paintings, you are likely to notice an array of indigo blues and alizarin reds.

Even so, his surfaces are thinly painted, and he speaks with distaste for the Expressionist tradition of visible brush strokes. "My work is not about paint," he told me. "It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint," he said.

Mr. Wiley has his share of critics who say his work is formulaic and repetitive. Whether he's working in oil or watercolor, he deploys the same strategy of inserting dark-skinned figures into very white masterpieces of the past.

To be fair, he has varied his subjects over the years. In 2012, for his debut show at the Sean Kelly Gallery, he added women to his roster of models. ("It was my idea," Mr. Kelly said, explaining that he was pushing Mr. Wiley to branch out.) Mr. Wiley has also ventured into sculpture, and his coming show at the Brooklyn Museum will include six stained-glass windows as well as a few bronze heads that can put you in mind of the portrait busts of Jean-Antoine Houdon, who flourished during the French Enlightenment.

"I am interested in evolution within my thinking," he said. "I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. If I made buttery, thick paintings, there would be critics of that. You just have to proceed."

In all fairness, he is only 37, which is still young for an artist. It would make more sense to talk about his evolution when he is 60 or 70. See you back here then.

Correction: February 8, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kehinde Wiley Puts a Classical Spin on His Contemporary Subjects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Wiley painting is easy to recognize. More often than not, it shows a solitary figure, an attractive man in his 20s, enacting a scene from an old-master painting. Dressed in contemporary garb - a hooded sweatshirt, perhaps, or a Denver Broncos jersey - the man might be crossing the Swiss Alps on horseback with the brio of Napoleon or glancing upward, prophet-style, golden light encircling his head.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kehinde Wiley reimagines old portraits because 'if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings'

# data[].attributes.subject
Kehinde Wiley reimagines old portraits because 'if Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings'

# data[].attributes.body
http://bit.ly/2r7v2eV
Author: William Troop
Copyright: PRI's The World
Published: November 02, 2016 · 3:30 PM EDT
License: CC-ND

# data[].attributes.headline
Brooklyn Museum: Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic

# data[].attributes.subject
Brooklyn Museum: Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic

# data[].attributes.body
Attributed to: Brooklyn Museum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this painting, Kehinde Wiley boldly recasts Napoleon as a contemporary black warrior. In his reference to Jacques-Louis David's painting Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Great St. Bernard Pass, Wiley creates a tension with traditional art history and its neglect of black subjects. His portrait symbolically reassigns value to the sitter, asking us to recall remarkable black leaders such as Toussaint L'Ouverture from Haiti, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, whose images appear far less frequently, if at all, in histories of art.

-Tumelo Mosaka, independent curator

Kehinde Wiley's series of reclining figures offers some of his most eroticized images. In many ways, this is a result of the tradition on which he has drawn. In those older works, the recumbent and vulnerable body was often used as a vehicle for the sensual. Take Femme piquée par un serpent, which refers to the scandal-inciting 1847 sculpture by Auguste Clésinger of a woman supposedly dying from a poisonous snakebite. The sculpture was highly praised for its sensual naturalism, but many viewers and critics wondered whether her voluptuous writhing was, in fact, evidence of her death.

Wiley adapted the famously contorted torso of Clésinger's female nude to show both the rear and front of his model: the viewer is confronted with both the alluring expanse of the white underwear and, at the same time, the searching face with open eyes and mouth. But the titanic recumbent figures in this series both incite and scoff at attempts to reduce them to mere erotic objects, and the vulnerability of their sources has been transmuted into confidence by a scale that is nothing less than heroic. -David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Though Kehinde Wiley is best known for his painted portraits, here he shifts from painting to sculpture. In both the lift and turn of the young man's head and the open V of his zippered collar, this bronze refers to an eighteenth-century marble bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Yet in many other ways, Wiley's work could hardly be more different: in substituting male for female, black for white, and present for past, he upends the earlier sculpture even as he quotes it. His radical reinterpretation encourages us to examine the stereotypes that can be found in portraiture. -Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum

Consider Kehinde Wiley and the model in the studio, poring over art history books together to choose an image that will serve as the source for a new painting, in which the model will replace some long-departed exemplar of European privilege and power. The model was previously unknown to the artist, but struck him-perhaps by the strong cut of his jaw, perhaps by his leonine confidence-as a fitting candidate for the elaborate and sophisticated impersonation in which he was hired to participate.The model, who remains unnamed, is from Harlem (New York City), as was the original subject, Willem van Heythuysen, a Dutch wool merchant from Haarlem (the Netherlands), whose portrait was painted by Frans Hals in 1625. As Hals's bravura portraits defined the Golden Age of Holland, Wiley's painting-at once parody and tribute-gives image to our own age's conflicted relationship to privilege, power, and the past.

-John B. Ravenal, Executive Director, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts

February 20-May 24, 2015

The works presented in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition includes an overview of the artist's prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures.

Wiley's signature portraits of everyday men and women riff on specific paintings by Old Masters, replacing the European aristocrats depicted in those paintings with contemporary black subjects, drawing attention to the absence of African Americans from historical and cultural narratives.

The subjects in Wiley's paintings often wear sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps, gear associated with hip-hop culture, and are set against contrasting ornate decorative backgrounds that evoke earlier eras and a range of cultures.

Through the process of "street casting," Wiley invites individuals, often strangers he encounters on the street, to sit for portraits. In this collaborative process, the model chooses a reproduction of a painting from a book and reenacts the pose of the painting's figure. By inviting the subjects to select a work of art, Wiley gives them a measure of control over the way they're portrayed.

The exhibition includes a selection of Wiley's World Stage paintings, begun in 2006, in which he takes his street casting process to other countries, widening the scope of his collaboration.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated catalogue published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books * Prestel accompanies the exhibition.

In this painting, Kehinde Wiley boldly recasts Napoleon as a contemporary black warrior. In his reference to Jacques-Louis David's painting Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Great St. Bernard Pass, Wiley creates a tension with traditional art history and its neglect of black subjects. His portrait symbolically reassigns value to the sitter, asking us to recall remarkable black leaders such as Toussaint L'Ouverture from Haiti, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, whose images appear far less frequently, if at all, in histories of art.

-Tumelo Mosaka, independent curator

Kehinde Wiley's series of reclining figures offers some of his most eroticized images. In many ways, this is a result of the tradition on which he has drawn. In those older works, the recumbent and vulnerable body was often used as a vehicle for the sensual. Take Femme piquée par un serpent, which refers to the scandal-inciting 1847 sculpture by Auguste Clésinger of a woman supposedly dying from a poisonous snakebite. The sculpture was highly praised for its sensual naturalism, but many viewers and critics wondered whether her voluptuous writhing was, in fact, evidence of her death.

Wiley adapted the famously contorted torso of Clésinger's female nude to show both the rear and front of his model: the viewer is confronted with both the alluring expanse of the white underwear and, at the same time, the searching face with open eyes and mouth. But the titanic recumbent figures in this series both incite and scoff at attempts to reduce them to mere erotic objects, and the vulnerability of their sources has been transmuted into confidence by a scale that is nothing less than heroic. -David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Though Kehinde Wiley is best known for his painted portraits, here he shifts from painting to sculpture. In both the lift and turn of the young man's head and the open V of his zippered collar, this bronze refers to an eighteenth-century marble bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Yet in many other ways, Wiley's work could hardly be more different: in substituting male for female, black for white, and present for past, he upends the earlier sculpture even as he quotes it. His radical reinterpretation encourages us to examine the stereotypes that can be found in portraiture. -Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum

Consider Kehinde Wiley and the model in the studio, poring over art history books together to choose an image that will serve as the source for a new painting, in which the model will replace some long-departed exemplar of European privilege and power. The model was previously unknown to the artist, but struck him-perhaps by the strong cut of his jaw, perhaps by his leonine confidence-as a fitting candidate for the elaborate and sophisticated impersonation in which he was hired to participate.The model, who remains unnamed, is from Harlem (New York City), as was the original subject, Willem van Heythuysen, a Dutch wool merchant from Haarlem (the Netherlands), whose portrait was painted by Frans Hals in 1625. As Hals's bravura portraits defined the Golden Age of Holland, Wiley's painting-at once parody and tribute-gives image to our own age's conflicted relationship to privilege, power, and the past.

-John B. Ravenal, Executive Director, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum is New York City's second largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps

# data[].attributes.subject
Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps

# data[].attributes.body
Left: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1803 version, oil on canvas 275 × 232 cm (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere); right: Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil paint on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (108 x 108 in) (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York)
Author: Dr. Gayle Clemans.
http://bit.ly/2pN6dQX
License: CC-SA

# data[].attributes.headline
Video: "Kehinde Wiley, a painter challenging the image of black men"

# data[].attributes.subject
Video: "Kehinde Wiley, a painter challenging the image of black men"

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/OXs66jwUooc
Copyright The Grio
Published on Feb 26, 2013

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kehinde Wiley, a painter changing the image of black men

# data[].attributes.headline
Video: "The fascinating stories behind Kehinde Wiley's paintings"

# data[].attributes.subject
Video: "The fascinating stories behind Kehinde Wiley's paintings"

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/zN-Rc09OVJY
Copyright MSNBC News
Published on Jan 3, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The fascinating stories behind Kehinde Wiley's paintings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The fascinating stories behind Kehinde Wiley's paintings Toure sat down with Kehinde Wiley who shared some artistic inspiration for 2015 and even let Toure paint. THE CYCLE - 5:43 PM 1/02/2015 explore: Culture, Society

# data[].attributes.headline
Video: "Artist reimagines classic paintings with modern twist"

# data[].attributes.subject
Video: "Artist reimagines classic paintings with modern twist"

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/ofX8JOl8sbo
Copyright CNN
Published on Jun 4, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Artist reimagines classic paintings with modern twist

# data[].attributes.body
Painting by Kehinde Wilde at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Attributed to Thomas Hawk
https://flic.kr/p/nYKtcH

License: CC BY-NC 2.0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore Thomas Hawk's photos on Flickr. Thomas Hawk has uploaded 127655 photos to Flickr.

# data[].attributes.body
Artist Overview

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kehinde Wiley (born February 28, 1977) is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of African Americans, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings. 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 previous American 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 was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.

Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California. His father, Isaiah D. Obot, is Yoruba, from Nigeria, and his mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, is African American. Wiley has a twin brother. When Wiley was a child, his mother wanted him and his brother to stay out of the streets and so she supported their interest in art and enrolled them in after-school art classes. At the age of 11, Wiley and his brother were selected with 48 other kids to spend a short time at a conservatory of art in Russia, just outside St. Petersburg. It was here that Wiley developed his passion for portraiture. Wiley noted that his brother was better at portraiture than he was and this created a competitive sense between them. The siblings would compete to see who could recreate the most realistic images. He continued with other classes in the US.

The twins were raised by their mother; once their father, who had come to the US as a scholarship student, finished his studies, he returned to Nigeria, leaving Freddie to raise the couple's six children. Wiley has said that his family survived on welfare checks and the limited income earned by his mother's 'thrift store' - which consisted of a patch of sidewalk outside their home. 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; before becoming an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who Wiley has later stated "made [him] the artist [he] is today."Jeffrey Deitch, an art dealer and curator, gave Wiley his first solo show - Passing/Posing - at the Hoffman Gallery in Chicago in 2005. Deitch later represented him for the next 10 years.

Wiley has cited the artist Kerry James Marshall as being a big influence on him.

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.

In a number of his paintings, Wiley inserts black protagonists into Old Master paintings. In 2007 he reimagined Théodore Géricault's early-nineteenth-century The Charging Chasseur with a young black man in casual streetwear as the sword-wielding hussar in his painting Officer of the Hussars.

Similarly, his Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) is based on Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800) 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". While creating the work Wiley attempted to use real horses to model and found that the proportions between man and horse in the original work 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 claims to be simultaneously drawn to the illusion used in Old Masters paintings while also wanting to expose them: "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. And so this thing that I do is in a strange sense being drawn toward that flame and wanting to blow it out at once."

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.

This reimagining was also seen in Wiley VH1 commissioned piece, where he was asked to paint honorees for the 2005 Hip Hop Honours program. Wiley depicted the rapper Ice T as Napoleon and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five a as Dutch Civic guard company from the 17th century.

Sometimes Wiley changes the gender of figures portrayed in the older works. In Portrait of a Couple from 2012, he replaces the couple (man and woman) depicted in the original painting from 1610 with a pair of 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. magazine described one of these as depicting "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 this work: "It's sort of a play on the 'kill whitey' thing". A second painting entitled Judith Beheading Holofernes also features a modern-day black woman as Judith and a white woman as Holofernes, challenging the viewer's expectations of this familiar motif, inviting political readings, and "bending a violent image from art history-which is rife with them [...]-to the needs of a country that is reexamining the violent underpinnings of even its most benign-seeming traditions." Art critic Walter Robinson remarks that this reimagining of the Judith/Holofernes story "suggests, with a jovial brutality, that Judith would prefer to be done with white standards of beauty."

Some conservative commentators 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.

Although Wiley portraits were initially based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, Wiley began to expand to an international view, including models found in urban backdrops from around the world - including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro. This immense body of world became known as, "The World Stage." Models are dressed in their everyday clothing and asked to assume poses found in artwork from their location's history. It's a juxtaposition of "the 'old' inherited by the 'new' - who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak." Wiley says this instantly sparks a conversation that is equally emotional as it is intellectual.

Wiley chooses countries that he believes are on the "conversation block" in the 21st century to be a part of The World Stage. Wiley chose Brazil, Nigeria, India and China because they are all "points of anxiety and curiosity and production" to the world. As Wiley has traveled around the world, he has noticed that many people around the world interact with American culture the Black American expression. As he continues to paint models from streets around the world, he is increasingly painting them not based on Western painting anymore, but art from these countries that have a wealth of history.

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 was chosen by Michelle Obama for the First Lady portrait on the same day. They were the first Black artists to paint an American President portrait and the First Lady portrait, respectively. The portrait 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. Compared to past presidential portraits, which show their subjects in a more realistic representation of an office as a background to show their authority, but Wiley 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, such as the chrysanthemum, the official flower of the city of Chicago (where he was elected as senator), African lilies, representing Kenya to show respect to Obama's father, who passed away when he was a child, and jasmine, representing Obama's childhood in Hawaii with his grandparents. The inspiration for Obama's pose came from the photography session to get photographs of Obama to use for the portrait. Wiley recalled a moment of repose in between shots when Obama was essentially as he is depicted in the portrait, a pose the artist felt was authentic to Obama. During the unveiling of Obama's portrait, Wiley stated in an interview that Obama wanted "a very relaxed, man-of-the-people representation" and Wiley created that image through small details: an open collar, the absence of a tie, and the perception that the President's body was physically moving towards the viewer instead of appearing aloof. Wiley 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. 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 Obama 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 Los Angeles and noticed that there weren't many artworks that display African Americans and he wanted to change 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 who looks like them being displayed at the museum, especially the portrait of the first Black American president. After the unveiling of Wiley's portrait of the President 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.

Wiley's initial series of works titled Rumors' of War were commissioned in 2005 and depicted contemporary men, as apposed to the 'heroic' equestrians in the originals, wearing sports team jerseys and Timberland boots, with Wiley deciding to keep the original titles.

Wiley revisited this idea after visiting Richmond, Virginia, where he 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 sporting jeans, Nike high-tops and dreadlocks, 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 and the institute that commissioned it. At 27 feet high and 16 feet wide, it is his largest work to date. Rumors of War was delivered in collaboration with Times Square Arts, Sean Kelly Gallery and UAP.

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 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.

In 2021, Wiley's work became a permanent for Penn Station's concourse in New York City. The stained-glass work depicts black break-dancers on a background of the sky with clouds. The piece is inspired by the 18th century ceiling frescoes of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The work is his first permanent, site-specific installation in the medium of glass.

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 Magazine's 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 (Richmond, VA), in the summer of 2016 (June 11 - September 5). It displayed nearly 60 of his paintings and sculptures.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

Wiley has kept his personal life private but acknowledges that he identifies as a gay man. If reference to his sexuality Wiley has said "my 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. I would always be looking at guys."

Between 2014 and 2018, he created Black Rock Senegal in Yoff, an artist residence designed by Senegalese architect Abib Djenne.

2006: Kehinde Wiley: Columbus at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH

2006: Willem van Heythuysen at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

2007: Kehinde Wiley: The World Stage-China at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI

2008: Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos at (PAFA) Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

2009: The World Stage: Africa at ArtSpace, San Antonio, TX

2009: Black Light at Deitch Projects, New York City

2010: Legends of Unity | World Cup 2010 | PUMA, several locations worldwide

2011: Kehinde Wiley: Selected Works at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah, GA

2012: Kehinde Wiley/ The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum, New York City

2011-13: The World Stage: Israel at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA; traveled to Jewish Museum (New York) (2012); the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA (2013); Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID (2013)

2013: Kehinde Wiley: Memling at Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ

2015-17: Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic at the Brooklyn Museum (2015), Brooklyn, NY; traveled to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2016); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2016); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2016); Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2016); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2017), Oklahoma City Museum of Art (2017)

Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York

Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio

Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California

Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in Detroit, Michigan

Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, California

Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida

High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia

Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California

Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts

Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida

Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas

North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina

Oak Park Public Library in Oak Park, Illinois

Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK

Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona

San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas

Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City

Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia

Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota

1. Wiley, Kehinde, ^ "On studying art in the forests of St. Petersburg at age 12, his hyperdecorative style, and combining grandeur with chance", Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2012.

2. ^ "Kehinde Wiley: 'When I first started painting black women, it was a return home'". The Guardian. January 9, 2019.

3. Hurst, Roy. ^ "Young, Gifted, and Black: Painter Kehinde Wiley", NPR, June 1, 2005.

4. ^ Hans Werner Holzwarth, ed. (2008). Art Now, Vol. 3: A cutting-edge selection of today's most exciting artists. Taschen. p. 512. ISBN 9783836505116.

5. ^ Levine, Jon (February 12, 2018). "Obama Portrait Artist Kehinde Wiley Once Painted Black Women Decapitating White Women". Yahoo Entertainment.

6. ^ Vankin, Deborah (January 24, 2020). "Obama Portraits to Tour in Summer '21; the Smithsonian Says the Portraits of Barack and Michelle Will Visit Five Cities, Including Los Angeles' LACMA". Los Angeles Times. ProQuest 2344081883.

7. ^ Pogrebin, Robin (February 12, 2018). "Obama Portrait Artists Merged the Everyday and the Extraordinary". ProQuest 2001133419.

8. ^ Ugwu, Reggie (September 27, 2019). "Kehinde Wiley's Times Square Monument: That's No Robert E. Lee". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.

9. Moynihan, Ellen, and Larry McShane, ^ "'Rumors of War' statue makes Times Square debut, provides a response to Confederate monuments in its future home of Richmond, Va.", New York Daily News, September 27, 2019.

10. ^ "Art: Kehinde Wiley" Archived March 15, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, USA Network. Retrieved October 13, 2010.

11. ^ "PUMA commissions Contemporary Artist Kehinde Wiley to create portraits of African Football Players to Celebrate World Cup 2010 Campaign" Archived August 2, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, PUMA Creative, January 2010. Retrieved October 13, 2010.

12. ^ "Painting: Kehinde Wiley", National Portrait Gallery: Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture. Retrieved October 13, 2010.

13. ^ Butterworth, Benjamin (October 20, 2017). "Barack Obama picks gay artist Kehinde Wiley to do his official portrait". .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kehinde Wiley (born February 28, 1977) is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of African Americans, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings. 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 previous American presidents.