KEHINDE WILEY
(b. 1977, Los Angeles, California)
Kehinde Wiley is best known for his monumental portraits that feature African American sitters in the settings of European paintings from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In 2017, he was commissioned to paint the portrait of former president Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, a work that received wide critical acclaim. As a gay Black man, Wiley has deliberately repositioned Black male bodies, challenging societal stereotypes of violence or aggression with images emphasizing his sitters’ vulnerability and sensuality.
Icons are demure. They’re small—you have to paint them in your lap. And they’re
loud—they’re gold and they’re blinging all out of nowhere. […] I’m in love with that
vocabulary. I wanted to create a body of work that had that same sense of
preciousness, that same sense of scale, that same sense of quiet, but also fused the
sacred and the profane. This notion of the sacred, pure, untouchable space where
divinity rests sort of muddied and sullied by this perceived notion of the Black
body.
Metal of Honor: Gold from Simone Martini to Contemporary Art is supported by the Abrams Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Wagner Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Fredericka and Howard Stevenson, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Additional support is provided by an endowment grant from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Media Partner: The Boston Globe
The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.