Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is an American painter that reimagines portraiture as a tool of mythmaking and propaganda. In traditional settings of Old Master paintings, Wiley painted contemporary Black subjects, subverting the conventional modes of representation.

Born in 1977 in Los Angeles, Kehinde Wiley grew up exposed to classical art from an early age. Weekend visits to the Huntington Art Gallery, and a summer spent studying art in Russia meant that he was very familiar with the genre of Western portraiture and figure painting. After earning his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and MFA from Yale University in 2001, Wiley became an artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

It was during this period, in the early 2000s, that Wiley began to create portraits of the young Black men that he would meet on the streets of Harlem, portraying them in the style of Old Master paintings by Renaissance artists. In 2018, Wiley was chosen to paint the official portrait of President Barack Obama, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

Wiley engages in dialogues of class, race and masculinity, offering an alternative perspective to art historical tropes and the images that we are familiar with seeing in art. He paints his subjects wearing contemporary attire — often streetwear — yet situates them against patterned backgrounds drawn from classical decorative arts. ‘The great heroic, often white, male hero dominates the picture plan and becomes larger than life, historic and significant,’ Wiley said in an interview with The Guardian in 2019. ‘When I first started painting Black women, it was a return home.’

Kehinde Wiley has exhibited widely, including in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin and Milan. His work now belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and more.