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Kehinde Wiley at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Photo by: Travis Fullerton, copyright VMFA)
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Kehinde Wiley at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Photo by: Travis Fullerton, copyright VMFA)
"I don't enjoy fist-raising political work," artist Kehinde Wiley told the sellout crowd at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' Leslie Cheek Theater on Friday night. "My work, my passion, comes from a small gray area where we are all indicted."
While establishment-challenging presidential candidate Donald Trump held a rally in downtown Richmond, a more colorful, and subtle, revolution was happening at the state museum a few miles west — the opening of Wiley's stirring "A New Republic" exhibition, a stunning and large-scale assemblage of the prolific African-American artist's work that sends a shot across the bow of everything the VMFA and other museums are about. Wiley's lecture — his only planned public appearance in connection with the exhibition — was eloquent and biting at the same time.
"I'm playing with the museum culture as a color in my palette," he told the (largely white) crowd. "Art is such a guilded rose, this ivory tower that we participate in presupposes that exclusion adds value to the appreciation of the work." He'd like to reverse that.
Wiley is known for retooling 18th- and 19th-century paintings and Western European power symbols, and posing people of color — from New York City's Queens borough to Haiti, from New Delhi to Israel — inside majestic, large-scale works that evoke or even mock beloved portraiture, such as Jacques-Louis David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps." The backgrounds of these deconstructed creations incorporate exotic fabric designs from across the world, and there is the addition of street fashion, hip-hop iconography and personal messages — like Rodney King's "Can we all get along?" etched in Hebrew. It's a distinctive view that the artist calls "figurative but also deeply conceptual."
Kehinde Wiley discusses one of his early works, done while a student at Yale University when he was exploring the texture and meaning of African-American hair. (Photo by: Don Harrison)
Wiley. 39, recounted the major themes of his work as he presented a slide show of the exhibition's pieces, starting from his days growing up in Los Angeles. "It was at the age 11 that my mother sent me and my brother to art school classes, to get away from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles," he recalled. The images inside L.A.'s Huntington Library left an impression. "I'd stare at the 18th- and 19th-century portraiture. the powdered wigs, the pearls, the trappings of power ... but most of all, as a kid, I was wondering what it must feel like to be able to take colored paste and a hairy stick and coax things into being."
The Yale-educated artist, who is openly gay, has become, as VMFA director Alex Nyerges told the crowd in his introduction, the hottest thing in art. "Ten years ago, we bought an early work [Willem van Heythuysen] and it's been a favorite." It was an investment that has paid off, as "A New Republic" is being shown in just a handful of cities — Fort Worth, Texas; Seattle; New York City's Brooklyn borough — beyond Richmond. Wiley's been on the "Today" show, referenced in "Empire," and served as the protagonist for several short documentaries about his travels to find models — ordinary people he sees on the street. His art can be provocative, but he's media friendly, not above allowing a TV host to help him with a painting.
After his talk, Kehinde Wiley watched the Harlem Chamber Players performing a musical complement to his art. (Photo by: Don Harrison)
"I strive for something more inclusive, and a sense of playfulness," said Wiley, who wore a florid green suit fashioned from the background design of one of his paintings. Still, he told those attending (and a simulcast crowd in the VMFA's main hall), "this is certainly serious stuff. These are real lives ... It's easy to look at [my art] as decorative portraits but, at their best, they are entire decades of life experiences."
His models are street kids, ordinary people who often collaborate with the artist on the chosen image. Wiley's inspiration came from a piece of paper he found on the street soon after he graduated from Yale — a discarded police mug shot. "It was an incredibly sympathetic portrait," he recalled, pointing to the screen at an African-American man's forlorn image, and then the subsequent renderings of it. "I started to ask, 'What is portraiture?' That's when I went into the streets and saw people. I had to go out there, stopping strangers in the street and asking people going to work, 'Will you come up and look at my work and model for me?' " He paused and garnered the crowd's laughter. "In certain areas of New York, that's hard to pull off."
Kehinde Wiley's "Colonel Platoff on his Charger" at the VMFA (Photo by: Tina Eshleman)
Since 2007, he's sought out faces across the globe — China (where he has a studio), Senegal, Haiti, Cameroon, Cuba, Morocco. The glue, he said, is "hip-hop culture. You see young people in India, in Brazil, and they're fashioning themselves in the guise of American hip-hop." Wiley said that his work explores the hyper-masculinity of the music. "I like to boil the masculine down to the essential components," he said, showing the crowd the stream of sperm cells (painted in 24 karat gold leaf) swimming in the image of "Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps." A collective gasp, and then mass chuckling, was heard reverberating around the Cheek.
Among the portraits featured in the Wiley exhibition is a commissioned piece of the late Michael Jackson. The artist — who initially ignored Jackson's inquiry, thinking it a prank — admits that he recorded his initial conversion with the King of Pop. "I know it was illegal. I don't care. I was so excited." The subsequent 11- by 10-foot painting, based on a Peter Paul Rubens work called "Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II," was finished after the singer's death."He wanted it to depict the war he was going through, the war that he created," Wiley recalled.
Kehinde Wiley's "Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II," was done at the request of Michael Jackson. (Photo by: Don Harrison)
Some of the most powerful works are renderings of bold African-American women, adorned in high-fashion couture dresses and impossibly high hair— appropriating the look of a Botticelli or Michelangelo oil. But his reimaginings of 18th-century military paintings — re-fashioned with brothers and attitude — is where he has fun. "Military portraiture is a potent way of displaying male masculinity, and nationality, they are always on horseback."
"A New Republic" features a dizzying blend of large-scale painting, evocative stained glass and examples of sculpture, all playing on the mashup between race and gender roles and sampled imagery of the artistocracy. But where where does the popular provocateur go from here?
"My question to myself is: How can I create work that resonates in the 21st century?" he asked the crowd rhetorically. "How can I compete with all of the social media, all of the different ways we communicate and what we want to be today?"
Wiley may be playing with the culture of museums in his art. But on Friday night, he was asking the same questions that they are.
"Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic" will be on display through Sept. 5. Admission is free on June 11, thanks to the Richmond Links chapter's sponsorship of African-American Family Day at the VMFA. For more information, and for related lectures, workshops and film series, go to vmfa.museum.
