Black Light

Celebrating the African American Male: The Portraiture of Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is an African American artist whose childhood in the notoriously gang and crime ridden South Central Los Angeles served as the stimulus for his investigating the world through art, a journey that has taken him to studies at Yale University and on to his current home base in New York City. With the artistic progress of Kehinde Wiley comes a profound respect for the grand portraiture of the past, the portraits of famous, powerful and wealthy men painted by the likes of Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Holbein, Eakins and others. Wiley's obsession, so obvious in his majestic paintings, is to bring that same degree of dignity to the neglected African American male, placing his own heritage on the degree of celebration that has been history's realm of the White Man.

Wiley's father returned to his native Africa before the birth of his son, and the need to find his identity resulted in his traveling to Africa at age twenty to finally meet his father, to define his roots. This transforming moment resulted in Wiley's beginning to concentrate on portraiture, not only as a means of understanding his father but also as a process of learning how to reproduce the intimacy that the face and body stance communicates. Once Kehinde Wiley gained recognition and honor for his portraits of the African American male, often responding to the famous portraits of history by substituting Black men in the poses of those portraits, his attention expanded to his current and ongoing project The World Stage in which he travels to Africa, China, and Brazil and other countries where he elevates the pictorial role of men of color to the same level of dignity once the constricting arena of history's White Man. The resultant portraits of black men are grand, richly colorful and decorated images of men in contemporary clothing in the swagger and stance of the proud man posing for an artist who appreciates their rising place in the globalization or unity of mankind.

Wiley's models' eyes engage the viewer, requesting/demanding respect, engendering a sensuous presence of proud masculinity against a background of wildly floral elements: the contrast is poignant. As he grows more confident as an artist, the direct quotations of past historical portraiture appear less often, evidence that the majesty of his chosen subjects is sufficient to relay the Aristotelian 'true reality'. Now he can resurrect references to saints and to the religious realm', while continuing to paint those attributes that simply reinforce the beauty of the Black male.

While Kehinde Wiley is only one of the numerous highly gifted and successful black artists painting today, he is particularly important not only for his enormous gifts as a polished craftsman as a portrait artist, but also for his commitment to address inequalities of the past. Metaphorically, he is beginning to put some chronic misperceptions to rest.

Grady Harp