Old, But Good - A piece from January 2006
Kehinde Wiley Paints Black Masculinity Anew
Kehinde Wiley talks about passing and posing -- the themes of his critically acclaimed paintings -- with an infectious excitement. Surrounded by the giant canvasses that line the walls of his studio, the artist is earnest and modest; his inspirations are as playful and original as his art work about black masculinity.
For his Passing/Posing series, Wiley says he wanted to explore whether black masculinity is “defined by hypersexuality, anti social behavior and a propensity towards sports, or is it something that is more authentic and elusive?”
The artist approached black men in Harlem and had them pose to emulate the iconography of classical European painting. The paintings, which now go for at least $ 20.000, have graced the cover of the prestigious Art in America magazine and won praise for Wiley, who has completed a residency at Harlem’s Studio Museum, and exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Deitch Projects in New York.
In his Passing/Posing paintings, Wiley reshapes and plays with popular constructions of black masculinity, giving new meaning to old poses and historical context to contemporary style. The artist was driven by several provocative questions: “How is it that they arrived in these poses? What are they passing for? What is this universe that’s being created?”
the immediacy of the pose
The path to success for Wiley started at the age of 11 when his mother enrolled him in a free arts program funded by the city of Los Angeles. Kehinde went on to attend the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. “I always felt this was going to be a life for me,” he says on a summer afternoon at his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I always felt like this would be something that I would do – whether I was a professional artist full-time or an artist who had a day job supporting my art habit.”
His love of art and desire for advanced formal training took him to the San Francisco Art Institute and then East to pursue an MFA at Yale University. After graduating, he accepted an offer to serve as artist-in-residence at the prestigious Studio Museum in New York City’s Harlem, a move that would have a significant impact on both his career and methodology.
Describing himself as “ignorant of [the Studio Museum’s] stature,” he focused his early time there experimenting with the bustling Harlem community, similar yet very different to his home of South Central L.A. “In the space of 5 blocks you get the chance to shop, eat, peacock, parade and be seen, "says the artist. "It’s violent in the shocking immediacy of people’s presence. For me, its incredibly engaging…something I wanted to somehow grapple with in my work.”
This desire to connect his new community and his work led to the early stages of creating the Passing/Posing series. Wiley walked those five blocks in Harlem showing men photos of his portraits and urging them to become a subject themselves. The approach initially yielded traditional studies of what he calls “alpha-male types. People who had this sort of energy surrounding them.” From those works, Wiley began discussing art history with these models, eventually having them thumb through his art books and choose poses to recreate. It was an important turn that, along with the motivation to challenge the viewer’s ability to step into the still image, led to the creation of the ongoing series.
It is exactly this freeness to question and confuse that define Wiley’s work. Though even the most surface examination of his work would identify the political questions raised around issues of race, gender, sexuality and the distance between subject and artist, Wiley doesn’t identify his painting as a political act.
In fact, his methodology is based on “a very radical association with play, as opposed to any sort of political or moral corrective. I came out of art school at a time when people where questioning the role of the black artist….but we are bound by time, bound by history, bound by circumstance and bound by meaning…And so there is no sense in which post-black can ever free itself from blackness. It is a function of blackness.”
From War To VH-1
For his new show, Rumors of War, Wiley moves into a firm discussion of the power of men and of war, using the iconography of old military portraits. To create the poses, Wiley hired what he calls “Hollywood horses,” horses trained to pose in studio settings and body doubles in addition to models recruited from Harlem and Brooklyn to stage the massive portraits. Wiley is working double time to finish the show, which is set to premiere at Deitch Projects in November.
" Over time there evolves a language involving white male agency," says Wiley about what inspired his new work …" It becomes a set pattern not only surrounding the portrayal of their power but also the story of their deaths and how they live their lives…I’ve been thinking about how I can manipulate that vocabulary.”
This summer, Wiley was also preparing for the VH-1 Hip Honors which were premiered in September. He was commissioned to paint the portraits of this year’s honorees, including L.L. Cool J, Ice T, Big Daddy Kane, and hip hop duo Salt N’ Pepa with their DJ Spinderella.
Wiley’s eyes light up as he describes L.L. Cool J coming to his studio and posing in the chair that he’s currently sitting in. Then, he unveils the completed 8 foot painting of Ice T posed in a near perfect reproduction of a painting of Napoleon on a throne along with the original image in the book that the rapper chose it from. Laughing, he describes the project: “It’s playful fun stuff. I took [my work] outside this high art vernacular, though it’s nothing I really consider part of my oeuvre (laughs)”. Despite his modesty, these paintings have the power to affect. Thanks to his rendering, Ice-T seems every bit as at home on a throne as Napoleon.
Wiley is already at work on more traditional painting along with works in several other mediums and continues to take it all in stride. “My life has changed radically," he says. "From sleeping on the floor of the Studio Museum and trading paintings for cigarettes to arranging to meet with magazines and working in television…things change. But in the end, I’m applying colored paste with hairy sticks to pieces of fabric, something I’ve been doing from the get go…there’s no fuss in that.”
