Kehinde Wiley: Power, Aristocracy, and Black Men
Kehinde Wiley is a New York-based artist whose work portrays young black men from across the U.S. in the settings, poses, and style of classical portraiture. The above painting is of St. Monica, and much of Wiley's work deals with the trappings of religious or aristocratic paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, transposed into the modern day.
They are fantastic. This one is my favorite:
It's an intentional echo of VanDyke's Le Roi a la Chasse:
I got to see it in the flesh, and it was arresting - intentionally larger than life, dominating the wall it was displayed on, ornately girded in a gilt frame. In an interview, Wiley notes, "In order to talk about this you have to get a conception of my perception of painting, which is for me an enterprise about very powerful men. The history of painting has been the history of those men trying to position themselves in fields of power that are very defined and codified as a type of vocabulary that's evolved over time and that I think is fascinating, in particular, military portraiture is one of the most fascinating because male power is being aestheticized in a pure way. They don't play around; it gets to the point in the most obscene way."
It is jarring to see young black men in the poses of kings and dukes. But it's more than a simple find-and-replace gotcha - I love the way the paintings highlight not only how blatantly power can be symbolized, but also how white those symbols have been. They emphasize, too, how fame has replaced aristocracy, how pop culture has a heavy hand in dictating who our public figures are (has anyone NOT seen Paris Hilton's response to John McCain?), and the new paths available to power. The young black men I see on television and in movies are almost always thugs or criminals, and I like these images of a world where they can instead be powerful, respected, possessing the walls of museums. Oh hell, they have all kinds of stuff going on, and I'm having trouble articulating exactly what. His website has more.