Wiley, Kehinde

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Kehinde Wiley

1977—

Artist

Kehinde Wiley became one of the most talked-about new figures of the modern art scene in the early 2000s with his paintings of young African-American men whom he met on New York City's streets—in poses modeled on classic paintings from the European artistic tradition. "It's art that's both brainy and ballsy, earning nods of approval from fans of Tupac [Shakur] and [Italian painter Giovanni Battista] Tiepolo alike," explained Interview magazine. Wiley's paintings were enjoyable for viewers who tried to pick out references to both urban African-American culture and European art history, but his intentions were serious. He tried both to challenge an art world that had long excluded African Americans and to ask questions about the nature of African-American male roles in the inner city.

Museum Trip Sparked Lifelong Interest in Art

Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1977 and grew up in the city's South Central district. His first exposure to art came at age 11 when his mother sent him to a free city-funded arts program class. The class involved museum visits, and Wiley was fascinated by the lush portraits by British painters Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds that he saw at the Huntington Library in suburban San Marino. "They were so artificial and opulent," he recalled to Mia Fineman of the New York Times. "There was this strange other-worldliness that, as a black kid from Los Angeles, I had no manageable way of digesting. But at the same time, there was this desire to somehow possess that or belong to that."

Enrolling at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Wiley decided that art was going to be a permanent part of his life. "I always felt like this would be something I would do—whether I was a professional artist full-time or an artist who had a day job supporting my art habit," he told Andre Banks of Colorlines Magazine. He entered the art competition in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's ACT-SO (Academic, Cultural, Technological Scientific Olympics) program repeatedly, advancing from a bronze medal in his first year to a gold in his third. Wiley earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and moved on for a master's at Yale University, a stronghold of both classical European technique and sophisticated art theory.

At first Wiley was unhappy at Yale, feeling that he was being pigeonholed as an African-American artist. "There was this overwhelming sense of, ‘O.K., Kehinde, where's your Negro statement?’" he told Fineman. Frustrated, Wiley painted watermelons in the styles of 20th-century European artists René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. He kept those paintings for himself even after he became well known and his canvases began to fetch prices in five figures. "While they're not some of the most sophisticated or beautiful paintings I've made," he told Fineman, "they're some of my favorites because they remind me of a point in my life that felt absolutely desperate and lost and powerless."

Found Inspiration in New York

After receiving his M.F.A. from Yale in 2001, Wiley became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum of Harlem, a major center for African-American art. At the time he was unaware of the institution's prestige and was just happy to have a place to create art free of obligations. He lived on a shoestring for several years, sometimes sleeping on the floor in one of the museum's studio spaces, but he was fascinated by the rich street life of the Harlem neighborhood. It was similar in some ways to what he had experienced growing up in South Central Los Angeles, but there were some major differences as well: California was a car culture, but New Yorkers tended to display their styles on foot. "In the space of five blocks you get the chance to shop, eat, peacock, parade, and be seen," Wiley told Banks. "It's violent in the shocking immediacy of people's presence. For me, it's incredibly engaging…something I wanted to somehow grapple with in my work."

Wiley began to reflect that in some ways, the ideas of power that young men in hip-hop culture tried to convey were not so different from those in the classic European portraits he had studied—the men who commissioned those portraits did so as a way of displaying their wealth and influence. Inspired to try to put his surroundings and training together, he began to approach total strangers on the streets of Harlem and ask whether they would pose for portraits. He looked, he told Banks, for "alpha-male types. People who had this sort of energy surrounding them." The answer at the beginning was usually a more or less polite no, but Wiley found ways of breaking down his subjects' resistance. Having an attractive woman friend come along helped, he found.

But what was most helpful was getting a conversation going with the subject about what he was trying to do. Sometimes he would be able to convince the subject to come to the Studio Museum and look at art history books—and then he would leave it to the young man involved to choose a classical portrait on which he wanted his own to be modeled. "I've seen people choose small figures in large paintings, not even the stars of the show," Wiley told Fineman, "and I've seen people who directly want to see themselves as Christ in heaven." The subject, still in street clothes, would then strike the pose in the painting, and Wiley would photograph him and paint from the photograph. The subjects remained anonymous; many of Wiley's paintings bore the name of the European works on which they were based (such as 2004's "St. Clement of Padua"), while others had abstract titles such as "Easter Realness No. 5."

Used Techniques of Old Masters

Well trained at Yale in the same techniques that the Old Masters themselves used (such as painting an underlying layer of red in order to heighten the color intensity of the whole canvas), Wiley was able to create portraits that had much of the impact of the originals. "Wiley can do a credible likeness, though his work is a trifle flat," observed Dan Bischoff of the Newark, New Jersey Star-Ledger. But his subjects were not European kings, churchmen, and merchants, but young men from Harlem, and their signs of influence were not crowns and Bibles but the corporate logos emblazoned on clothing and shoes. For Wiley those logos had an ambiguous function: he likened them to slave brands, but he also recognized that they represented empowering free choice for those who wore them. Wiley's paintings had the same kind of ambiguity: he was paying tribute to European art and at the same time deeply questioning it, and he was carving out a place for hip-hop culture in studios and museums while at the same time questioning its consumerist aspects.

The backgrounds added another layer of meaning to Wiley's paintings. They showed neither European interiors nor New York City street scenes. Instead they consisted of abstract or semi-abstract patterns, drawn on anything from Irish calligraphy to repeated representation of biological sperm cells. In "Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia No. 1" a fleur-de-lis pattern seemed to bleed into the image of a man in a Los Angeles Dodgers shirt and a blue baseball cap. The effect was to make the three-dimensional subjects jump out unexpectedly from a flat background. Richly colorful and slightly larger than life, Wiley's canvases instantly grabbed the attention of those who saw them.

At a Glance …

Born 1977 in Los Angeles, CA. Education: San Francisco Art Institute, BFA, 1999; Yale University School of Art, MFA, 2001.

Career: Artist; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, artist-in-residence, 2001-02.

Awards: NAACP ACT-SO academic olympics, gold medal; Studio Museum of Harlem, residency, 2001-02.

Addresses: Gallery representation—Deitch Projects, 76 Grand St, New York, NY 10013. Web—www.kehindewiley.com.

The results, Fineman noted in the New York Times, brought Wiley "the kind of meteoric success that most young artists only dream about." Top galleries, not only in New York but also in other art centers like Chicago and Los Angeles, signed on to represent him. A steady stream of articles, both in mainstream publications like Essence and specialist art magazines such as the brainy Artforum International, kept readers up to date with his career. Wiley did not have to go through the round of group shows that most young artists use as a springboard to more prominent solo exhibitions; his first solo show was in 2003, at New York's Deitch Projects gallery, and by the next year his paintings were the subject of a major show called Passing/Posing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Cultivated Interesting Public Persona

Key to Wiley's continuing success was his knack for presenting himself publicly in colorful ways. He acquired a pair of Italian greyhounds of the kind that sometimes appeared in paintings of the houses of the aristocracy in the golden age of the great Italian cities. His parties got talked-about among the New York art elite thanks to boundary-crossing that paralleled the devices found in his paintings, with a tuxedo-clad string quartet playing the Kelis hit "Milkshake" on one occasion. By 2006 Wiley's paintings were commanding prices in the $20,000 range—and customers had to enter their names on a waiting list in order to get one.

Wiley's art continued to develop in new directions in the mid-2000. He expanded into sculpture in 2006, creating busts of young men in hooded sweatshirts that were influenced by Italian models of the Baroque era (1600s and early 1700s); writers began to use the terms Urban Baroque and neo-Baroque to describe his style. His fame began to spread beyond New York with museum exhibitions in many other cities (and at a show in Belgium called Sorrywereclosed); in the fall of 2006, for the first time, he traveled to the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art to create portraits based on paintings in a specific museum's collection. He got the invitation, curator Joe Houston explained to the Columbus Dispatch, because "I felt he is one of the most interesting emerging artists," and few observers of the art scene would have disagreed with that assessment.