Kehinde Wiley: Changing the Narrative of Art

The Obamas chose Kehinde Wiley to paint the presidential portrait that would hang in the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery. The painting would hang next to the 44 other presidents in the gallery. Wiley’s depiction of Obama is extremely different from all the previous presidential portraits, both in style and content. Obama is surrounded by flowers that symbolize his past and cultural background: African blue lilies that represent his Kenyan ansentory and his fathers birthplace, chrysanthemums that symbolize Chicago, and pikake jasmines that represent his birth-state of Hawaii. Obama’s pose is casual and welcoming. While his attire is traditional, it’s much less formal than expected in a presidential portrait.

Kehinde Wiley is a portrait painter and sculptor based out of Harlem, New York City. He was born in Los Angeles on February 28th, 1977. Wiley’s mother always supported his and his twin brothers' interests in art. When Wiley was a child, his mother wanted him and his brother to stay out of the streets, so she enrolled the two boys in after-school art classes. At the age of 11, Wiley and his twin brother, Taiwo, spent a short time at a conservatory of art in Russia. Wiley admitted that his brother was better at portraiture than he was, but this created a tense relationship between them. They would often compete to see who could create the most life-like images. Later in life, Kehinde Wiley earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999 at the San Francisco Art Institute and his Masters of Fine Arts at the School of Art at Yale University in 2001. One of Wiley’s goals as an artist is to change the way children, particularly black children, see themselves through art. “It means something when young African-American 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.’”

At a young age, Wiley developed an interest in portraiture and frescos, particularly the work of Venetian painters such as Titian and Giambattista Tiepolo. He is inspired by French Rococo painting, Islamic architecture, African textile design, contemporary fashion, and urban hip hop. Wiley’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Wiley’s early work consists of photo-realistic paintings of men set against a floral background, very similar to what we see in the portrait of Obama. Instead of going to a modeling agency and trying to find a person that fit his creative vision, Wiley meets and picks his models from the streets of Harlem as they pass by. Kehinde often paints his models in street clothing, presumably what they were wearing at the time he met them.

Wiley often plays with source materials. For me, It completely resembles the attitude of a rapper, sampling and recycling from a myriad of sources. For example, his painting Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005), now hanging in the Brooklyn Museum, replicates Napoleon Crossing the Alps (c. 1801) by Jacques-Louis David. Wiley swaps Napoleon in his regal clothes and bicorn hat with an anonymous black model in camouflage, Timberland boots, sweat bands, and a bandana, and sets him against a Rococo-style background that add a richness of texture and depth to his luxurious portraits. In a interview with Trevor Noah, when speaking on the impact of his art, Wiley said, “Going to the museums [in Los Angeles] and increasingly throughout the world as an adult, you start to realize that those images of people of color just don’t exist. And there’s something to be said about simply being visible.”

One of my favorite artworks that Wiley has produced is a statue titled Rumors of War. The work, which is Wiley's largest at 27 feet high and 16 feet wide, is a statue made fully of bronze. It was unveiled in Times Square on September 21, 2019, where it stood until December 1, 2019. The statue then traveled to its permanent home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond where it is situated within blocks of monument avenue, a street where a number of Confederate statues are displayed. At the unveiling ceremony in Richmond, Wiley said, “When I came here, all those years back, and I saw Monument Avenue, and I saw some extraordinary sculptures….People took a lot of time to make something powerful, beautiful, elegant. And menacing”. He noted that art has always depicted what people value, even in paintings of ruffled collars or bowls of fruit. Later saying, “The monuments in Richmond point to a century of white supremacy”. He hoped that, by using the visual language of memorialization to depict the people who were oppressed, he could show that the city’s values have changed. “This work of art is not about honoring one particular individual.”

The thing that really interests me about this statue is that it is modeled after a statue of J. E. B. Stuart, a high-ranking Confederate general. The statue of J. E. B. Stuart was removed from its pedestal and placed into storage on July 7, 2020, after having stood in Richmond Virginia for 113 years. Wiley spoke about seeing the statue of J. E. B. Stuart in an interview with talk show host and comedian Trevor Noah where he said: “Confederate sculptures have been haunting and terrorizing Americans for a good 50, 60 years now… These sculptures were designed to remind African-Americans of their place in society and they’re still in major parts of the south. I went to Richmond on a trip, and I saw one of these sculptures, and I said ‘This is a language that is powerful’ and it’s one that I wanna be able to use and sort of inhabiting it, to haunt it. And so I found several African-American men, merged all of their features, and created this kind of Everyman on a horse and re-created those monuments for The 21st century to create sort of a new way of saying ‘Yes’ to people who happen to look like me.”

What Wiley is doing is very timely and important. He is taking the power of art as his own and changing it in a new, impactful, inclusive, and beautiful way. His art depicts something familiar in an unfamiliar way and I believe that what Wiley is doing will change the narrative of art history.