Kehinde Wiley

In February of 2018 one of the most significant moments in contemporary American art occurred when the Presidential portrait of Barack Obama was revealed. It depicted a stern, but relaxed Obama gazing directly from a wooden chair framed by a wall of chrysanthemums, jasmine, and African violets. This was an unprecedented addition to the canon of presidential portraiture, and the artist to credit is Kehinde Wiley.

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1977 Kehinde Wiley has made a name for himself with his aesthetic of painting classical scenes of rococco and renaissance oil portraits with black bodies at the center of the scene. Inspired by his many trips to classical art museums he wanted to create images that celebrated blackness in the same wealth-centric aesthetic that European aristocrats were formerly only allowed to occupy.

From this thesis of situating blackness in the iconography of black wealth has sprung more images that question not only ideas of who is allowed wealth, but also who is allowed to be be depicted as powerful, who society is confortable seeing violence acted by, and what gender roles are considered acceptable in the black community. Wiley credits his identity as a black, gay man to envision such surreal images in his art.

His images of contemporary black men splayed like a Boticelli nude, or black women brandishing the heads of decapitated white women have been met with controversy, but they are examples of utilizing the “there and then” to address the “here and now.” His work could be called Afrosurreal in how it utilizes the lens of an “othered” voice, or Afrofuturist in that it perhaps reimagines an alternate past where images of blackness were the image of wealth.