Kehinde Wiley

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Born: 1977

Summary of Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is a young, African-American painter, whose sensitive, lively, political portrays of Black people, ranging from adolescents he encounters on the streets, other contemporary artists, and even former President Barack Obama, are very literally altering the face(s).

Wiley earned his reputation for his realistic and brilliantly coloured photographs, typically with stunning floral backdrops, of young black males. His generous and lively pictures frequently confront the audience with Black Masculinity is associated with terror and violence in the US and put young people of colour into galleries and museums, which are so underrepresented in them.

Wiley’s work comes under the art, cinema and literature genre of identity politics that mainly deals with elements of the artist’s identity, such as race, sex and sexuality. Wiley is very essential to know that black people are the subjects and the audience of his paintings, particularly black American males. At a time when young black males are continually being demonised in the media and even being killed by the police on the streets, Wiley’s pictures are an important record of the black community’s strength, style, diversity and beauty in the United States.

Wiley speaks about portraiture and the “field of power” alluding to how painted portraits of individuals are strong but also that pictures may empower persons painted like this and flip the painting of conventional portraits face down.

In 1975, Laura Mulvey said that pictures of women should be static objects for males to look at. Bell hooks questioned Mulvey by pointing out that Mulvey’s race was completely missing and black (who were penalised for gazing at white women) and black women are excluded (in that they are never beautiful enough to be objects of desire). Bell hooks established the “oppositional gaze” concept where black people interrupted white appearance and hence white dominance. The subjects of Wiley frequently exemplify this oppositional gaze and question comfortable white ways of seeing and looking in a manner that is distinctive and very essential to the decolonization of the canon of western art.

Wiley frequently appropriates and re-use recognised imagery of art historical and tropical, including as Napoleonic portraits, heroic marine paintings and traditional nodes. He criticises art historical conventions – like white people painted by other white people when we look at painting – and uses existing means to raise black people to the significant places that are occupied by these white people in the history of the art.

As a homosexual black guy, in contrast to the dread, strength, and aggression, Wiley needs to replace black male bodies as objects of want, eroticism, and vulnerability. Homogenous black males are often subjected to double victimisation in society, with Wiley’s deliberate queering of familiar imagery; his use of flowers and camp, his fun portraiture are all significant contributions to America’s queer black art and the significance of queering and visa-versa.

Biography of Kehinde Wiley

Childhood

Kehinde Wiley was born in central South Los Angeles, with a mother of African America, Freddie Mae Wiley, and a father of Nigerian Yoruba, Isaiah D. Obot, who came as a scholar to the US, then after finishing his studies he returned to Africa to work in architecture, leaving Wiley’s mother to raise her six children. When Wiley was a kid his mother noticed his creative ability, stating that at the age of 11 she and his twin brother enrol in post-school art courses and he could replicate whatever he saw by sketching. Wiley adds, “She wanted us to keep away from gang culture; it seemed like most of my classmates were dead or in jail. So every weekend we were on buses to learn painting for five hours. It was an enormous pain in the ass. He’s now in real estate and finance. My brother has ended up in love with medicine and literature and business. But I truly caught the itch of painting.”

He claims the family survived mostly in his childhood welfare inspections and that whatever replacement changes were made at his mother’s store, which had no sign or retail space, just a sidewalk in front of his home on West Jefferson Avenue. In the area it was all called ‘Freddie’s Store,’ and Wiley claims that it had all kinds of stuff like books used, windup record players, tarnished gold-leaf frames, and porcelain figures. He remembers that he and his siblings would assist their mother to seek a new inventory and will continuously drive about in a loud Dodge van. “This was the most humiliating aspect, he adds. You are 11, and you don’t want to witness your neighbour jumping into your trash. That’s death in society!”

At 12, in 1989, Wiley was one of 50 American youngsters who travelled to Russia to study art and Russian at the Center of the US/USSR. Initiatives.

His experiences as a young black guy in the USA would have a significant impact on his creative career. “I know how young black guys are viewed, he adds. They’re lads, typically frightened young boys. I was one of them. I was one of them. I was very frightened of the Police Department of Los Angeles.” He is also homosexual, he says, “It’s not black and white that my sexuality is. I’m a homosexual guy who sometimes strayed. I’m not bi. I’m not bi. I had absolutely lovely women’s relationships, but they weren’t durable. There wasn’t my passion. I’d constantly stare at the men.”

Early Life

Wiley graduated from the High School for Arts in Los Angeles County, where he had the pleasure of seeing many galleries in Los Angeles. He was greatly inspired by Gainsborough and Constable’s art. In 1999 he obtained his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded an MFA by the Yale University School of Art in 2001. During his studies at the art school, he said that the main lesson he learnt was to produce the art he was to make, not the art his instructors desired.

When Wiley finished his MFA, he met a crumpled piece of paper on the streets of Harlem, which he took and discovered to be a mug photo. He began to conceive of the mug as a portrait, asking, “What is portraiture? It’s a choice. It’s a choice. You can place your body in the world for your celebration.” But you don’t have a choice in a mug picture as to how you are portrayed. He then experimented with the creation of mug shots. This approach also led him to ponder if portraiture is ever able to convey more deeply than the physical characteristics of the sitter.

Shortly after graduating from his MFA, Wiley became a residential artist at the Harlem Studio Museum. “They paid me $500 a month, he adds. I’d sleep on the museum grounds and create my paintings. This made me the artist I am now and I want to compensate for it,” thus he has established a Senegal studio with his residency programme.

Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer and curator, gave the first solo exhibition in New York to Wiley and subsequently represented him for the following 10 years.

Mid LIfe and Ongoing Work

In 1997, Wiley started going to West Africa, searching for and reconnecting with the father from whom he had been alienated for many years. Though Wiley claims their first encounter was “not the best,” he kept coming back and developing a relationship with his father. Wiley’s father died away in late 2019. The musician recently said: “I’m happy that I’ve taken this step to meet him. It was definitely about him but it was much more than him; it was about the uncles, tales and cousins and a feeling of myself that exists in history and in time.”

Wiley begins as a ‘street casting,’ in which he searches for young men of the colours who have “street casting,” wherein he searches inner-city areas (typically in New York and Los Angeles, but also foreign cities like Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar, and Rio de Janeiro) for young men of colour who have “a spirit of self-possession” in the inner city (typical in New York and Los Angeles, but also foreign cities like Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro). He adds that this process is “this lovely thing where I’m on the streets and individuals who connect with me, whether cultural or sexual. My guy is based on my own sexual need.”

Wiley approaches them and explains his art-making method after having exchanged views with a prospective applicant, giving them some samples of his work. He claims that most individuals refuse him, but interested parties are asked to his studio to shoot pictures. While his themes are characteristic of Renaissance master paintings, he represents them in their current context, “interrogating the concept of the master painter” and citing “historic sources [while at the same time] positioning young black men in this power”

VH1 ordered Wiley for the 2005 Hip Hop Honors Program to create portraits of the honours. In his usual manner, he turned the musicians into a 17th-century Dutch civil guard company following historical depictions of leading individuals such as Ice T, Napoleon, Grandmaster Flash, and Furious Five.

In October 2011, Wiley won the Artist of the Year prize from the United Federation of Teachers/New York City Art Teachers Association, and also got the Artist of the Year Award from Canteen Magazine. Two of his paintings were shown in conjunction with the Art Production Fund on top of 500 New York City taxis in 2011.

In October 2017, the commission for Wiley was announced for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to create a portrait of former US President Barack Obama. The finished piece was shown on February 12, 2018. The first black painters to paint an official president or First Lady portraits for the National Portrait Gallery are Wiley and Amy Sherald, who painted first Lady Michelle Obama.

Rumours of War (2019) is Wiley’s biggest bronze sculpture to reply to recent demonstrations against Confederate leaders’ colossal monuments that existed in cities throughout the United States in 2019 in Times Square, New York.

Wiley started his work on the sculpture in the late 2010s, most importantly to produce a massive equestrian bronze statue with a horse ridden by a black young man with ribbons, rubbed jeans, a top Nike shoe entitled “War Rumors.” The sculpture was designed to respond to now-controversial monuments of the Confederate, like that of General Confederate J.E.B.Stuart in Richmond, Virginia, which was dismantled in July 2020 after protests. The monument of Wiley was unveiled in September 2019 in Times Square, New York.

Wiley has lived in his Brooklyn studio for many years and also works in Chinese and Senegal studios, where teams of artists work on his elaborate backdrops before Wiley takes over the figures. When the Covid-19 virus started to spread worldwide in early 2019, Wiley worked on an “epic painting and film” project in Norway to investigate European landscape and sea-painting art historical traditions.

Wiley, knowing that the international borders had soon come to an end because of COVID-19, decided to go back to his luxurious Black Rock, Senegal complex and studio to spend quarantine with other Black artists, including German and Ghanaian mixed media artist Zohra Opoku, Nigerian writer Kelechi Njoku, and US painter Devin B. Johnson. Wiley recalls, “We depended a lot, socially and physically, on one other. We had a genuine lockdown […] We were on campus, working, talking, criticising one other’s work.” Now Wiley is constructing a second branch of his Black Rock studio in Nigeria, with ambitions to welcome more Black musicians internationally shortly. He thinks it’s like “creating the dream home that I never had.”

Famous Art by Kehinde Wiley

Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps

2005

This equine picture is suitable for the renowned Bonaparte Crossing the Grand Saint Bernard Pass by Jacques-Louis David, 20 May 1800. (1800). A young African-American man wears army fatigue, a white bandana, brown boot, red sweatbands on his wrists, and a flowing golden robe over his shoulders in Wiley’s rendition. The composition is the same as David’s masterpiece, with the figure pointing upward on rocky terrain with its tattooed right bracelet. As in the original, the names of the military commanders who led their forces over the alps are carved into the rocks in the lower corner left (“BONAPARTE” “HANNIBAL” and “KAROLUS MAGNUS”), but in Wiley’s rendition, there is an additional name, “WILLIAMS” (Wiley’s saddename) above the other two. Wiley also signed and dated the work on the horse’s breastplate in the same location as David. His backdrop is the beautiful red and gold baroque brocade design of the top three-quarters of the picture. On the backdrop, the deep red pattern shows little white sperm swimming. The artwork is fitted with an adorned gold frame.

Portrait of Barack Obama

2017

In October 2017, former U.S. President Barack Obama chose Wiley to paint his official portrait in the exhibition of Presidents of Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, America. On February 12, 2018, the artwork was revealed. It shows Obama seated on a wooden chair that seems to be floating between a brilliant green leaf, interwoven with chrysanthemums, jasmine and African blue lys. Obama wears a dark blue suit and a white coloured shirt in his picture, with the top 2 unfinished buttons and no tie. His arms are crossed, his elbows on his knees. His marriage band may be seen on his left ring finger. He stares at the spectator straight.

Ship of Fools

2017

Four young black guys are shown in this picture in a decrepit rowboat, in the middle of a stormy sea. The gloomy black and orange sky shows a storm on its approach. A solitary tree with green leaves sits in the centre of the boat. One man stands shirtless and in blue pants, holding an oar with one hand and the other. Two of the guys are sitting on each side, seeming to chat and shout or laugh. The fourth guy is standing at the rear of the boat and gazing back at the ocean.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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Kehinde Wiley is a young, African-American painter, whose sensitive, lively, political portrays of Black people, ranging from adolescents he encounters on the streets, other contemporary artists, and even former President Barack Obama, are very literally altering the face(s). Wiley earned his reputation for his realistic and brilliantly coloured photographs, typically with stunning floral backdrops, of young black males.
His generous and lively pictures frequently confront the audience with Black Masculinity as associated with terror and violence in the US and put young people of colour into galleries and museums, which are so terribly underrepresented in them.Wiley’s work comes under the art, cinema and literature genre of identity politics that mainly deals with elements of the artist’s identity, such as race, sex and sexuality.
Wiley is very essential to know that black people are the subjects and the audience of his paintings, particularly black American males.

At a time when young black males are continually being demonised in the media and even being killed by the police on the streets, Wiley’s pictures are an important record of the black community’s strength, style, diversity and beauty in the United States.Wiley speaks about portraiture and the “field of power” alluding to the manner in which painted portraits of individuals are strong but also that pictures may empower persons painted like this and flip the painting of conventional portraits face down.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey said that pictures of women should be static objects for males to look at.
Bell hooks questioned Mulvey by pointing out that Mulvey’s race was completely missing and black (who were penalised for gazing at white women) and black women are excluded (in that they are never beautiful enough to be objects of desire).

Bell hooks established the “oppositional gaze” concept where black people interrupted white appearance and hence white dominance.
The subjects of Wiley frequently exemplify this oppositional gaze and question comfortable white ways of seeing and looking in a manner that is distinctive and very essential to the decolonization of the canon of western art.Wiley frequently appropriates and re-use recognised imagery of art historical and tropical, including as Napoleonic portraits, heroic marine paintings and traditional nodes.
He criticises art historical conventions – like white people painted by other white people when we look at painting – and uses existing means to raise black people to the significant places that are occupied by these white people in the history of the art.As a homosexual black guy, in contrast to the dread, strength, and aggression, Wiley needs to replace black male bodies as objects of want, eroticism, and vulnerability.

Homogenous black males are often subjected to double victimisation in society, with Wiley’s deliberate queering of familiar imagery; his use of flowers and camp, his fun portraiture are all significant contributions to America’s queer black art and the significance of queering and visa-versa.