The Artist Crafting the Image of What the Future of Black Power Looks Like
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The out modernist painter Kehinde Wiley, famous for his iconic portraits of the Obamas, is crafting the future of what Black power looks like in a new profile in The New Yorker.
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The New Yorker:
“He moved to New York in 2001, arriving with little money and a romantic vision of life in the big city. Brian Keith Jackson, a novelist from Louisiana, remembers meeting Wiley when he came to a party at the writer’s apartment with a plastic bottle of gin. Jackson made him sign it, and from then on the two were inseparable. In the years since, he has accompanied Wiley on travels from China to Brazil, and written several essays for his catalogues. “There weren’t many Black gay men that were the face of something,” Jackson told me. “We just struck out on the city, because you needed that support.”
Wiley also found community at the Studio Museum, where, in 2001, he began a yearlong residency. He’d arrived at a propitious moment. Thelma Golden, then best known for her landmark exhibition “Black Male,” had just started her tenure as chief curator of the storied Harlem organization. “Kehinde is one of those artists who was fully formed from the start,” Golden recalled. She took an interest in the young painter partially because his work paralleled her research for her exhibition “Black Romantic,” which explored the tension between popular genres of idealizing portraiture and the conceptualism of institutions like her own. In the catalogue, she wrote, “I was suspicious of the notion of the ‘real’ or the authentic that many of the artists strive to present”; she found it full of “overwrought sentiment” and “strident essentialism.” Yet she also wanted to reckon with its appeal.
Wiley’s work bridged the two worlds. At the time, he was working on a series called “Conspicuous Fraud,” which explored the commodification of identity through depictions of young men with explosively branching Afros against monochromatic backdrops. In the most celebrated work from the series, a man in a suit closes his eyes as his smoke-like hair fills the canvas: a dream of escape, or a silent struggle with double consciousness. Golden featured the painting in her exhibition, earning Wiley immediate notice. In an interview for the exhibition’s catalogue, he declared, “I want to aestheticize masculine beauty and to be complicit within that language of oppressive power while at once critiquing it.”
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Harlem was a revelation, Wiley recalled, “teeming with this sexy black young energy” that strutted down the sidewalk. At the museum, he often slept in his studio, overlooking 125th Street, papering the walls with Polaroids of men he’d met around the neighborhood. A breakthrough came when he found a Black teen’s discarded mug shot and arrest record. Wiley took the photograph home and began to consider the chasm between the aggrandizing conventions of European portraiture—with its kings, saints, and smug gentry—and its perverse opposite in the photo studios of the New York Police Department. What if he reversed the terms, simultaneously demystifying the Western canon and endowing Black youth with Old Master grandiosity?
The breakthrough earned Wiley his first solo museum show when he was just twenty-six. “Passing/Posing” transformed a room at the Brooklyn Museum into a b-boy Sistine Chapel. Arch-shaped portraits depicted men in basketball jerseys posing like Biblical figures. Break-dancers cut up clouds in a mock ceiling fresco called “Go.” (Wiley recently reprised the composition in stained glass, for a monumental skylight in the new Moynihan Train Hall.) It was “a sendup of Old Master painting as the ultimate cum shot,” Wiley told the art historian Sarah Lewis; many of the young men were surrounded by filigrees of fleurs-de-lis and spermatozoa. The packed opening featured a performance by the Juilliard-trained drag queen Shequida, who sang a Baroque arrangement of Kelis’s “Milkshake” accompanied by the Columbia Bach Society. “I had no idea where I was going to go,” Wiley told me, though it was immediately clear that he was going up.
“The future was almost there,” an early studio assistant recalled. With fondness and frustration, she and others described a boss who projected a fabulous persona even as he struggled to pay salaries and slept off all-nighters on piles of bubble wrap in a ragged Chelsea studio that doubled as his apartment. Wiley started hiring extra hands—initially, a quartet of Columbia undergraduates—before he had even finished his residency, overwhelmed by a demand for his paintings that quickly outstripped his ability to make them. A division of labor emerged. Wiley cruised Harlem for striking young men, often bringing along a gay assistant or an attractive woman friend. The artist did his own photography. Lacking the equipment to print transparencies, he outlined subjects from projections of ordinary printouts rubbed with Vaseline. Assistants completed the elaborate backgrounds, leaving Wiley to concentrate on the figures.
The team worked at a furious pace. For the gilt patterns, they used a shimmery model paint more often applied to cars than to canvases, and its strong fumes often sent them scrambling to the windows. Wiley was “not interested in quality control,” one of the painters told me, pointing out errors in foreshortening figures—an artifact of outlining from projections—and inconsistent sperm motifs in his early work. One assistant found him to be more attentive about his own image; she was struck by a Dolce & Gabbana shirt he’d bought for an opening while she confronted him about an overdue payment. Wiley insists that it was fake; either way, it was a talisman of his determination. “He executes on his ideas,” the painter told me. “Everything he said, he did.”
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“Nothing surprised me,” the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch said of Wiley’s success. “It was all preordained.” What interested Deitch wasn’t just the paintings but the persona. Wiley’s compositions evoked predecessors like Barkley Hendricks, with his poised, gilt-backed icons of everyday Black style; a tradition of homoerotic photography, dating back to Fred Holland Day and Wilhelm von Gloeden, who posed peasant youths as classical heroes; and the exaggerated gender play of contemporary drag, fashion, and advertising. At the same time, Wiley’s reputation conjured up the spectres of Warhol and Basquiat, collapsing their dance of detached media manipulator and streetwise innocent into a single figure.
Deitch staged Wiley’s next hit show, “Rumors of War” (2005), an exhibition of equestrian portraits whose standout, “Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps,” became the young artist’s signature work. It swapped out the diminutive Corsican general of David’s masterwork for a muscular Black man in a headband and fatigues, raising a tattooed arm as he digs his Timberland boots into the stirrups. Deitch arranged its purchase and long-term loan to the Brooklyn Museum, where it hangs in the lobby. Like many other Wileys that crib titles from their inspirations, it now surpasses the original in online search results.
Years before a repentant art world started buying Black art like indulgences, Wiley’s rise provoked grumbles. Roberta Smith described his early paintings as “gaudy shams” enjoying “fifteen minutes of fame,” and compared the young artist to the fanciful and largely faded French salon painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Others saw more commercialism than critique in his slick fantasies, especially once he began collaborating with luxury brands like Grey Goose. Wiley, undaunted, embraced celebrity. He painted LL Cool J for the VH1 Hip Hop Honors, and Michael Jackson, at the singer’s own request, portraying him on a white horse, clad in plate mail and serenaded by cherubim. He threw legendary parties, cooking, at one bacchanal, a menu of six quail, four rabbits, three red snappers, and two ducks with the heads left on for about a hundred guests.”
