RUMORS OF WAR
KEHINDE WILEY
Kehinde Wiley: Rumors of War
In 2019, Kehinde Wiley revealed his first public sculpture, ‘Rumors of War,’ in New York’s Times Square, presented by Times Square Arts in partnership with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The work is a direct response to the confederate memorials across the US. The monumental sculpture features an African-American man dressed in urban streetwear sitting on a horse in a striking pose. ‘Rumors of War’ is a powerful repositioning of young black men in our public consciousness and engages the national conversation around monuments and their role in telling incomplete narratives in today’s contemporary world.
"The inspiration for Rumors of War is war—is an engagement with violence. Art and violence have for an eternity held a strong narrative grip with each other. Rumors of War attempts to use the language of equestrian portraiture to both embrace and subsume the fetishization of state violence. New York and Times Square in particular sit at the crossroads of human movement on a global scale. To have the Rumors of War sculpture presented in such a context lays bare the scope and scale of the project in its conceit to expose the beautiful and terrible potentiality of art to sculpt the language of domination."
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