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Kehinde Wiley Reflection Paper

Kehinde Wiley is based in New York as a portrait artist who challenges gender constructs

through form, historical referencing, and color. His mother instilled a need for learning within

him at a young age. He took art classes at California State University at 11 years old and

attended an art program outside St. Petersburg at 12 years old. From the Los Angeles County

High School for the Arts, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Master’s degree at

Yale.

While at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he found a discarded New York City Police

Department mug shot of a black man. It inspired his early series Conspicuous Fraud. He

followed with his breakthrough Passing/Posing series in 2001-04, where he replaced the heroes,

prophets, and saints of Old Master paintings with young black men who were dressed in

trademarked hip-hop attire.

Kehinde presses that, “My goal was to be able to paint illusionistically and master the

technical aspects, but then to be able to fertilize that with great ideas.”1 He wanted to expand

upon what he says here and convey a new way of thinking for a modern-day society that looks

down on the black community and a world of black masculinity being known as violent. He

wanted to show people of color in a positive light and empower them.

His works show black men, and recently women, in poses of colonial masters. He

combines eurocentric classical style with his history growing up in Los Angeles in the late ’80s

and he was consumed in an environment that was driven by some of the defining elements of

hip-hop: violence, anti-social behavior, streets on fire. He says he was fortunate for his mother

1
Kehinde Wiley, “Kehinde Wiley Studio KW Studio,” Kehinde Wiley Studio, accessed November 7, 2021,
https://kehindewiley.com/.
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being focused on getting his family out of the hood and glad she placed him in art classes

because it gave him an escape, a creative outlet, a drive. “On weekends I would go to art classes

at a conservatory. After school, we were on lockdown.”2 It was in Yale that his work became

much more about arguments surrounding identity, gender, and sexuality.

“I loved when I walked into LACMA as a kid and seeing Kerry James Marshall’s grand

barbershop painting. But it was thrown into very sharp relief when thinking about the absence of

other black images in that museum… I think it’s important to destabilize yourself, and I do it

because I want to see people who look like me.”3

It was this thinking that led Wiley to begin breaking the social constructs people view

paintings in for years to come. Kehinde describes how he was taken back by the whitewashing in

paintings and wanted to find a center for his art rooted in black flesh paired with classical ideals

of nobility. Throughout his work we see him challenge Gauguin in his exoticism and

exhibitionism. He refuses to show dark skin in a sexually gratifying way and covers their bodies

for privacy which expresses power through their expression. He focuses on using a multitude of

body types to spread diversity and show the true black form. His views on black male figures in

his work do not display racial stereotypes but impose what is already there, a human figure just

like it should be seen. There is no toxic masculinity superimposed on his artwork like it has been

seen in the black community. Straight from Kehinde’s website, he describes his own goals within

his work, “By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth

and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, the subjects and stylistic

references for his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and

2
Kehinde Wiley, “Kehinde Wiley Studio KW Studio,” Kehinde Wiley Studio, accessed November 7, 2021,
https://kehindewiley.com/.
3
Kehinde Wiley, “Kehinde Wiley Studio KW Studio,” Kehinde Wiley Studio, accessed November 7, 2021,
https://kehindewiley.com/.
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provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery,”4 and his purpose is clearly seen in his art paired

with his words. His art though, speaks for itself to express his ideals of form, function, gender,

and stereotype.

I had never seen Kehinde’s work before we researched him for this project. The way he is so

adamant about depicting many bodies is aspiring as a young artist still learning to draw the

figure. All bodies should be celebrated and it is wholesome to see this great artist re-enforce this

message. With a new age of gender identity surfacing in society Kehinde’s method of displaying

beauty, masculinity, and femineity felt true to the younger generation. He shows gender in a

different way than what people like to perceive. The norm is simple, easy, expected: “Pink for

girls, blue for boys, and only women can be nurses,”

Kehinde throws that in the trash and uses color, posture, and composition to make his art stand

out and scream “I want to make you uncomfortable so good change can be experienced.” His

works represent a notation that gender should not be connected to behavior and I fully agree. We

live in a different world and many people today refuse to accept that. Kehinde uses pose so

eloquently and pairs it so well with the composition that I didn’t think twice about how he

depicted gender because it felt natural. Masculinity can look feminine and feminine can look

masculine, power is power no matter what form. I fell in love with his art and aspire to create

diversity and use form like him within my work.

Bibliography
4
Kehinde Wiley, “Kehinde Wiley Studio KW Studio,” Kehinde Wiley Studio, accessed November 7, 2021,
https://kehindewiley.com/.
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Mancoff, D. N.. "Kehinde Wiley." Encyclopedia Britannica, February 24, 2021.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kehinde-Wiley.

Wiley, Kehinde. “Kehinde Wiley Studio KW Studio.” Kehinde Wiley Studio. Accessed
November 7, 2021. https://kehindewiley.com/.