Kehinde Wiley

Sometimes, I just like to give people a little shine on here. Consider this one of those times.

Blogger, meet Kehinde Wiley. Since seeing him television earlier this year, I have become slightly obsessed with Kehinde Wiley. He's a 32-year-old LA-born, but New York-based painter. Don't think Van Gough or Rembrandt or any classical artist for that matter. His stuff really has helped define our modern culture.

His process is fascinating; incorporating model perspective to draw a sharp contrast between classical and contemporary. There is SO much power in his work and raises many an interesting question about black masculinity in art, challenging perceptions of race, gender and urban culture. I love that he was educated in traditional art at San Fransisco Institute of Art and Yale, but isn't constrained by its historical context.

His stuff was actually on loan to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington as part of its contemporary art exhibit called RECOGNIZE!: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture. The exhibit closed late-2008. I'm so pissed I missed it. I keep saying that I'm gonna mosey my way down there one of these weekends to visit the NPG, the Newseum and the Hirshhorn. I really need to get down there soon before more good shit disappears.

Here's more about him and some of his pieces from the National Portrait Gallery's website:

"For most of Kehinde Wiley’s very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects. In 2005, VH1 commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of the honorees for that year’s Hip Hop Honors program. Turning his aesthetic on end, he used his trademark references to older portraits to add legitimacy to paintings of this generation’s already powerful musical talents. In Wiley’s hands, Ice T channels Napoleon, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five take on a seventeenth-century Dutch civic guard company."

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Three Graces
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil and enamel on canvas
182.9 x 423.8 cm (72 x 96 in)

Triple Portrait of Charles I
Kehinde Wiley, 2007
Oil and enamel on three canvases
Three stretchers each measuring: 182.9 x 91.4 cm (72 x 36 in)

Big Daddy Kane
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas
243.8 x 182.9 cm (96 x 72 in)


Ice T
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas
243.8 x 182.9 cm (96 x 72 in)


LL Cool J
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas
243.8 x 182.9 cm (96 x 72 in)


Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 243.8 cm (72 x 96 in)