Rumors of War

Standing as a statue to the violence afflicted against bodies every day, Rumors of War presents a powerful visual repositioning of young black men in our public consciousness while directly engaging the national conversation around controversial monuments and their role in perpetuating incomplete narratives and contemporary inequities.

In recent years, the discourse and actions around these monuments have included efforts to better contextualize them and have resulted in both the addition and removal of monuments in more than 30 states and New York City. Wiley’s first public artwork, a towering 27 feet high and 16 feet wide, Rumors of War was presented in New York City’s Times Square before the sculpture was permanently installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Kehinde Wiley x MTV

Kehinde Wiley reimagined MTV’s iconic “Moon Person” statuette for the 2021 Video Music Awards and in honor of the network’s 40th anniversary. As a nod to that historic first broadcast, a full-sized version inspired by Wiley’s botanical take on the sculpture was also on display at the Kennedy Space Center’s Rocket Garden.

Kehinde Wiley x AMEX

The most exclusive credit card in the world gets a special update this year with three novel designs featuring wearable tech and Art Cards in collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas and artist Kehinde Wiley.

The Kehinde Wiley x Centurion Art Card incorporates botanical motifs from the artist’s painting of Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which is part of his famous An Economy of Grace series dedicated to celebrating African-American women. The portraits feature custom-made couture gowns designed by Riccardo Tisci who was with Givenchy at the time. “An important part of my work is the decorative, organic background of the person being portrayed. The design on the Centurion Card stems from my interest in botanical elements and is a reference to my signature style,” explains Wiley.

Art Adds

In collaboration with Art Production Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to producing ambitious public art projects in New York City, 250 taxi tops donated by Show Media displayed Wiley’s art instead of the ubiquitous advertisements. ‘Art Adds’ – a citywide, month-long public art campaign – transformed a platform normally used for commerce into one for culture, uniting separate entities into one roving exhibit.

At any given time, the dynamics of the project were different; an exhibit constantly in flux, transforming with traffic patterns throughout the day. In a city where images call out from everywhere, ‘Art Adds’ was an opportunity to see and connect to the message and magic of art. Seen by over 5 million New Yorkers each day of the campaign, Wiley’s art reached people of all ages, races, and backgrounds.

Modern Kings of Culture

To celebrate the launch of its new Le Melon flavor featuring the essence of ripe, juicy Cavaillon melons said to be relished by French kings, nobility and artists, Wiley partnered with Grey Goose to celebrate the ‘Modern Kings of Culture’ in the arenas of film, music and sport. Using his signature style that perfectly juxtaposes royal and modern iconography, Wiley created a series of custom portraits honoring the selected individuals who have charted extraordinary paths to achievement.

The three ‘kings’ featured in the campaign were Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, producer, writer, and NYU film professor, Spike Lee; Grammy Award-winning music producer Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz); and two-time Olympic Gold Medalist and NBA sensation Carmelo Anthony.

The portraits were auctioned off at a marquee art event in collaboration with Sotheby’s during Art Basel in Miami Beach, with proceeds going to each “king’s” charity of choice: The Spike Lee/NYU Graduate Film Production Fund, the Bronx Charter School For The Arts, and The Carmelo Anthony Foundation.

Legends of Unity

To herald the World Cup and celebrate Puma’s long-standing partnership with African football, the brand commissioned Wiley to create four original works of art inspired by three of football’s most decorated players, in a series titled ‘Legends of Unity.’

Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon, John Mensah of Ghana and Emmanuel Eboué of Ivory Coast sat for Wiley as he painted three individual portraits of each player. A fourth ‘Unity’ Portrait was painted with all three players together, symbolizing the united countries of Africa. Wiley traveled to each player’s home country, where he and the athletes sat down over art books of pre-colonial West African sculpture, choosing a Nigerian piece featuring a king flanked by supporters as the basis for the group portrait and sculptures from each player’s country of origin for the other paintings. The portraits’ backdrops were inspired by African textiles: Wiley painted the soccer players in bright swathes of poppies, golden keys and snake-like vegetation.

The individual portraits, measuring 5 feet by 6 feet, and the ‘Unity’ portrait, measuring 9 feet by 12 feet, were unveiled in Berlin and traveled as an exhibition to Paris, London, New York, Beijing, Tokyo and Milan, ending in South Africa for the World Cup.

Wiley also lent some of his unforgettable backdrops to the Puma Africa lifestyle collection of apparel, footwear and accessories. In so doing, Puma expanded its reach beyond the pitch by creating African-inspired lifestyle products and supporting artwork that is relevant to a younger, more engaged generation.

Black Rock Senegal

Wiley’s acclaim has positioned him to provide opportunities for others, and while there are countless artist residencies around the world, few are based in Africa. In 2019, Wiley launched a residency for visual artists, writers and filmmakers at the westernmost edge of continental Africa blending art, architecture, nature and community. Wiley’s own career was advanced early on by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program, which served as a direct inspiration for Black Rock.

Situated above Yoff Bay in the bustling, vibrant city of Dakar, Senegal, Black Rock seeks to address the imbalance of the dominant media narrative concerning Africa. The residency brings artists to a waterfront compound to live and work, where each spends 1-3 months creating new work and experiencing the local culture. Named for the volcanic black rocks that line the property’s shoreline, Black Rock also includes a personal residence and studio space for Wiley, as he seeks to divide his time between New York and West Africa and interact with the artists in residence.

Black Rock is just the start of Kehinde’s desire to support artists and add Africa to the world’s roster of prestigious art residencies. Connecting to his Nigerian heritage, Kehinde is also working with Ghanaian British architect Sir David Adjaye on a forthcoming studio in Lagos.

Brooklyn Museum:
Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley

Wiley’s triumphant ‘Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps’ (2005), a hallmark of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, came face to face in 2020 with the nineteenth-century painting on which it is based: Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Alps’ (1800–1). The unprecedented pairing of these two magisterial portraits also marked the first time David’s original version was on view in New York.

Seen together, the works by David and Wiley reveale how race, masculinity, power, and representation layer onto portraiture and shape the writing of history. Both paintings cast their protagonists—be it the French general Napoleon Bonaparte or an unnamed man in everyday streetwear—within a heroic tradition of equestrian portraiture. However, each artist defines an icon that reflects the unique political, historical, social, and artistic conditions of their day and age.

Galerie Templon:
Tahiti

Wiley’s 2019 exhibit focused on Tahiti’s Māhū community, the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender, between male and female. The Māhū were highly respected within their society until they were banned by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Wiley’s portraits of beautiful, transgender Tahitian women reference and confront Paul Gauguin’s celebrated works, which also feature subjects from the transgender community, but are fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification.

Building off of Wiley’s earlier portraits that addressed issues of masculine identity and virility, these new portraits explore issues of identity through the lens of transformation, exploring both artifice and artificiality as a trans-cultural phenomenon.

Saint Louis Art Museum:
Saint Louis

The Saint Louis Art Museum presented ‘Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis,’ an exhibition deeply connected to the Missouri city and informed by visits Wiley made there in 2017. Through a process of street casting, he invited strangers he met in neighborhoods in north St. Louis and Ferguson, the community where 18-year-old unarmed Black citizen Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2014, to pose for his paintings.

Wiley then created eleven original portraits inspired by carefully chosen artworks in the Museum’s collection. The style, scale and grandeur of those paintings is epitomized by Wiley’s ‘Charles I,’ in which the artist switched the gender of the sitter from male to female to depict Ashley Cooper, a St. Louisan whose sister, Shontay Haynes, is depicted in ‘Portrait of a Florentine Nobleman’ from the same exhibition. In the Wiley painting, Cooper stands tall with her wrist against her hip, looking down at the viewer in a pose identical to that of Charles I in the Dutch original.

Stephen Friedman Gallery:
In Search of the Miraculous

In this exciting new body of work, Wiley departs from the singular portrait style for which he is most celebrated and engages with both classical romanticism and epic maritime allegorical painting. In a series of seascape paintings, Wiley captures dramatic scenes of men battling perilous waves at sea and more contemplative and serene portraits of men on shorelines. Here the artist crucially replaces the bold patterned textile backgrounds of previous work with darker, more earthy tones that evoke the unyielding nature of the sea.

Presenting nine new paintings and his first three-channel artist film, Wiley interweaves the canon of art history with present day politics to investigate key subjects of migration, madness and isolation in contemporary America. This comes at a critical time when the current political administration is seeking to fortify land and sea borders with an agenda that resonates globally.

Sean Kelly Gallery:
Trickster

A departure from Wiley’s practice of painting anonymous sitters, the monumental portraits in ‘Trickster’ include a select group of extraordinary contemporary artists––Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Nick Cave, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

In Trickster, Wiley explores the range of ways that artists engage with and draw from the world around them. He employs the mythological trickster trope – existent in nearly every culture’s folklore – to not only examine how artists disrupt the status quo and change the way in which we think, but as a signifier of how people of color navigate both real and symbolic social boundaries inherent to their blackness.

Wiley views the artists portrayed – amongst the most important and influential of their generation – as having navigated, pushed and redefined boundaries to establish a new canon within the history of Western art. Wiley, as is central to his practice, draws on the historically Eurocentric Western art canon as a point of departure for Trickster.

Petit Palais:
Lamentation

For his first solo show in France, and the first ever solo museum exhibition dedicated to a living male African-American artist in France, Wiley’s ‘Lamentation’ featured a previously unseen series of ten monumental works in the form of stained glass windows and paintings, showcased at the heart of the museum’s permanent collections.

For the Petit Palais, Wiley continued his exploration of religious iconography making reference to Christ and for the first time to the figure of Virgin Mary. Thus, the six stained glass windows were installed on a hexagonal structure in the Gallery of Large formats. They were accompanied by four monumental paintings dressing the walls of one of the rooms of the collections of the nineteenth century on the ground floor.

Brooklyn Museum:
A New Republic

The works presented in ‘A New Republic’ raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition included an overview of the artist’s prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures, and also traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth;,the Seattle Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery:
The World Stage: Haiti

In previous World Stage iterations, Wiley conducted his castings on the streets. With ‘The World Stage: Haiti,’ he employed a different approach specific to the culture: open calls on the radio, posters around the streets of Jacmel, Jalouise and Port-au-Prince culminating in beauty pageants.

Haiti’s rich and varied religious traditions, as well as its traditional crafts and decorative arts, informed Wiley’s modern chronicle of life and culture. The backgrounds of the paintings incorporate images of vegetation found on Haiti such as okra, brought first to the island from Africa, and sugarcane, a food product that was broadly exploited as a cash crop during slavery.

Stephen Friedman Gallery:
The World Stage: Jamaica

Wiley continued his vast and celebrated body of work entitled ‘The World Stage’ with an exhibition featuring Jamaican men and women assuming poses taken from 17th and 18th Century British portraiture. This juxtaposition between the sitter and the art historical references reflects on the relationship between the island and her former colonial power.

Wiley restages this history, transforming the race and gender of the traditional art-historical hero to reflect the contemporary urban environment. The subjects’ proud posturing refers to both the source painting and the symbolism of Jamaican culture, with its singular people and specific ideals of youth, beauty and style.

The World Stage:
Israel

The works in ‘The World Stage: Israel’ are vibrant, large-scale portraits of Israeli youths from diverse ethnic and religious affiliations, each embedded in a unique background influenced by Jewish ritual objects, featured along with the artist’s selection of traditional Jewish papercuts and textiles from the Jewish Museum’s collection.

Wiley scouted his subjects in discos, malls, bars, and sporting venues in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Lod. The men in this series – Ethiopian and native-born Jews and Arab Israelis – express a modern sensibility that supersedes religious and ethnic affiliations. Distinctively, he places them against vivid, ornate backgrounds inspired by Jewish papercuts, an intricate form of folk and ceremonial art. The hand-carved wooden frames are crowned with emblems borrowed from Jewish decorative tradition.

Sean Kelly Gallery:
An Economy of Grace

‘An Economy of Grace’ represents a significant departure from Wiley’s previous subject matter by depicting African-American women, his first-ever series dedicated to female subjects. The models for the paintings were cast on the streets of New York City. Their poses are based on historical portraits of society women by Jacques-Louis David, Thomas Gainsborough and John Singer Sargent, among others.

Instead of representing the models in their own clothes, as is the case with his portraits of men, Wiley collaborated with Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of the famed French couture house Givenchy, to design long dresses for the women. As creative collaborators, Wiley and Tisci spent numerous hours together walking through the galleries of the Louvre and discussing both the aesthetic and conceptual context for the project, specifically society’s ideals of feminine beauty and the frequent marginalization of women of color.

Following these conversations, Tisci designed six unique dresses for the models. The resulting paintings to be shown in An Economy of Grace are a celebration of black women, creating a rightful place for them within art history, which has to date been an almost exclusively white domain.

Galerie Daniel Templon:
The World Stage: France

For his first European exhibition, Wiley set off to seek out African cultures and the colonial history of France in Africa (1880-1960) as he explored Morocco, Tunisia, Gabon, Republic of Congo and Cameroon. Delving into issues of racial and sexual identity, Kehinde Wiley’s works create unexpected collisions where art history and street culture come face to face. The artist makes eroticized heroes of the ‘invisible’, those traditionally banished from representations of power, while the rococo backgrounds mixed with African street patterns make visible two aspects of France’s cultural heritage seldom viewed in tandem.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery:
The World Stage: India and Sri Lanka

Wiley’s India paintings take young men of the street and accord them a heroic cast. Dressed casually, any one of them could be a youth from the streets of Bombay and Bangalore. Meanwhile, the settings they inhabit in Wiley’s paintings – temples or prayer rooms, or studios with fanciful backdrops – are the sites of mass engagement, spaces that offer community and hold promise. In these works Wiley hones in on the traditions of that recall South Indian poster art, the still, stylized effect reminiscent of the Indian photo studio, and most of all, a sense of the portrait as iconic. In this melee of signs we may read another India, one that is young, tentative and as yet un-inscribed in history.

The Studio Museum:
The World Stage: Africa

The World Stage: Africa, comprised ten paintings made following the artist’s stay in Nigeria and Senegal. These vibrant canvases exemplify the artist’s current practice: presenting everyday people as figures of power and authority by adopting pictorial conventions found in Western art history. In this body of work, he also used poses based on public sculptures that celebrate Nigerian and Senegalese independence from colonial rule. The patterns of the enveloping backgrounds are based on traditional clothing worn by West African women.