Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his naturalistic paintings of Black subjects that reference the work of Old Master paintings. In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former U.S. President Barack Obama's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "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."

Career
Residency and inspiration
Kehinde Wiley is a portrait painter whose monumental works use bold color and engage themes of race and representation. He has been described as among contemporary artists seeking to address racial power dynamics through art. After receiving the commission to paint former United States President Barack Obama, Wiley gained wider attention, exhibiting in multiple international shows and exhibiting in such places as Cuba, Nigeria, and Los Angeles.

The beginnings of Wiley's portraits can be traced back to his time in Harlem during a residency at the Studio Museum. During that period, he found a crumpled NYPD mugshot of an African American man in his 20s with basic personal identifying information. Wiley kept the image, which would later inspire future works including Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence) and a recreation in Mugshot Study (2006, Plate 8).

Reflecting on the mugshot's influence, Wiley has said the discovery altered his view of what portraiture could be and sharpened his thinking about the portrayal of Black men. To address what he saw as gaps in that portrayal, he drew on his background in classical painting, combining modern source material with historic portrait traditions.

Wiley's Rumors of War is a bronze sculpture that commemorates African American youth affected by social and political conflicts across the United States.

The World Stage
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. It has been described as a juxtaposition of "the 'old' inherited by the 'new', who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak."

Wiley has said he selects countries he sees as on the "conversation block" in the 21st century to be represented in The World Stage. These have included Brazil, Nigeria, India, and China, which he has called "points of anxiety and curiosity and production" for the world. He has increasingly referenced historic artistic styles from the subjects' own countries rather than relying solely on Western traditions.

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 the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery "America's Presidents" exhibition. Amy Sherald was simultaneously chosen by Michelle Obama for the First Lady portrait. They were the first Black artists to paint the official portraits of a U.S. president and First Lady.

From initial discussions to unveiling on February 12, 2018, the project spanned more than two years. While many presidential portraits depict their subjects in formal office settings, Wiley portrayed Obama seated on an antique chair, seemingly floating amid foliage. Each plant references a location from Obama's life: chrysanthemums, 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 died when he was a young adult; and jasmine, representing Obama's childhood in Hawaii with his grandparents.

Wiley has said Obama's pose in the portrait was inspired by a candid moment during the reference photo session that felt authentic to Obama. During the unveiling, Wiley stated that Obama wanted "a very relaxed, man-of-the-people representation," achieved through small details such as 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 also explained that the composition stages a visual tension between Obama and the foreground foliage, intended to suggest a life larger than any single narrative.

Obama has said that Wiley's work elevates ordinary people to look regal and places them within American visual life, reflecting Obama's belief that politics should be about the country unfolding from the bottom up and not the other way around.

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.

Some conservative commentators criticized Wiley's selection for the commission by noting earlier paintings in which he depicted Black women holding the severed heads of White women in versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Rumors of War series and statue
Wiley's initial series of works titled Rumors of War (2005) and reimagined equestrian portraiture with contemporary male subjects wearing items such as sports jerseys and Timberland boots, while retaining the original titles.

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. Stuart statue which inspired it and the institute that commissioned it. At 27 feet high and 16 feet wide, it was his largest work to date as of 2019. The project was delivered in collaboration with Times Square Arts, Sean Kelly Gallery and UAP.

Other work
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, featuring 11 paintings of contemporary black artists.

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. He is an accomplished painter, though far less successful commercially.

In 2021, Wiley's Go became a permanent installation in the concourse of New York City's Penn Station. The stained-glass work depicts Black breakdancers against a 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. He also curated a group show of African arts featuring Nigerian artist Oluwole Omofemi at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles.

Imagery, symbolism, and themes
Reimagining the Old Masters with Black protagonists
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. He depicts his larger-than-life figures in a heroic manner, giving them poses that connote power and spiritual awakening in their portrayal of masculinity.

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 Officer of the Hussars.

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. 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."

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 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."

His art has been described as having homoerotic qualities. Wiley has used a sperm motif as symbolic of masculinity and gender.

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. 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."

Masculinity and femininity
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. Patterns of lace and flowers are often associated with femininity, and, by submerging his male figures in these ornate backgrounds, Wiley acknowledges the beauty and youth of his subjects.

Power
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. Some figures appear in poses that do not align with contemporary expectations of Black masculinity.

Background imagery
Wiley's portraits are known for their bright, intricate backgrounds that are purposefully different from the portraits they are based on. Where original backdropsof the classical portraits Wiley uses for his references are full of sweeping estates, their families, and other possessions, Wiley instead introduces detailed backgrounds full of bright patterns that at times extend into the foreground. His intent is to create a background that, just like his figures, is competing to be noticed, and to blend the two in order to elevate them both.

Wiley draws inspiration for these designs from historical work from the Rococo and Neoclassical art periods as well as elaborate wallpapers. The original portraits that Wiley recreates would have hung in lavish homes of the wealthy amongst other extremely detailed ornaments to further enhance the wealth of the homeowners. By replicating these patterns and motifs from opulent decor and other elements of interior design and encapsulating his figures within them, Wiley is recreating a similar sense of wealth with his portraits. Viewers are led to re-contextualize their view of the urban figures as they associate them with the lavish backdrops.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2025