Analysis Of Kehinde Wiley s Large Scale, Brightly Colored

Kehinde Wiley’s large-scale, brightly colored, highly patterned portraits of African American subjects are a salute to traditional portraiture as well as a critique of the art historical focus on the privileged male Caucasian. The artist scouts out ordinary black men of ages 18 to 25 from urban settings to copy poses from works by master Western painters like Titian and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The photographs of their poses become Wiley’s references for his enormous, dazzlingly vibrant portraits. The extreme realism of the figure combined with intense color use, decorative patterning, and larger-than-life scale all emphasize the extravagant grandeur of power and male dominance. Wiley has radically shifted the paradigm to make a contemporary statement about the long absence of the black male figure in historical portraiture. Wiley was born in 1977 in crime-laden South Central, Los Angeles, and was enrolled in weekend art classes at California State, Los Angeles, by his mother to keep him away from neighborhood dangers. He later received his bachelor’s degree in 1999 at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then a master’s degree in 2001 at Yale. His first artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem began his practice of street casting black men with attitudes of self-confidence. The casting for his work has spread internationally with his latest body of paintings, The World Stage, to locations such as China, Lagos and Dakar, Brazil, India and Sri Lanka, Israel,