In a darkened show space inside San Francisco’s de Young museum, Kehinde Wiley strikes a contemplative pose for the camera, as if channeling the throngs of people expected to flutter through here to consider his latest exhibition: an Archeology of Silence.
The turnabout is fair play for Wiley, the estimable portraitist renowned for drafting people off the street to model for works in the style of old masters such as Jacques-Louis David. But instead of Napoleon on a horse, he’ll swap in a Black man wearing a bandanna, camouflage suit and Timberland boots.
If Wiley seems comfortable being closely examined, it’s because he got plenty of experience while “developing his chops” at San Francisco’s Art Institute. “I was actually a nude model for a brief time for all the figures classes,” recalled Wiley of the awkward experience of posing for fellow students. But the value in it for him went beyond the $15 an hour salary. “All of the bodies that I was painting were white models,” he explained on a tour of his latest exhibition. “I can perhaps say I was painting white bodies longer than any. There’s a tradition of learning to create shadow and light, of molding the body into something that’s beautiful that I learned through painting whiteness. It’s a strange notion to arrive at Blackness through whiteness.”
An Archeology of Silence, which made its US premiere last month, brings the 46-year-old’s artistic journey full circle while building on the trenchant explorations of Blackness, strength and masculinity that recur in his work – with scale as the dominant theme. This time, however, instead of godding up ’round-the-way types and sprinkling their portraits in with similarly heroic likenesses of Ice-T and Michael Jackson, Wiley puts a magnifying lens on Black vulnerability. The flowery filigree abides in some work, but on much larger canvases; lush greenery is replaced with decaying foliage. Instead of standing proud, Wiley’s figures are in repose or lie prone and lifeless. One hides behind folded arms, others have their faces turned totally away, showing only their afros or cornrows.
The dark exhibition, sparingly lit on purpose, underscores the funereal mood; the tone, partly a callback to classic religious paintings that juxtaposed the sacred with the profane, is meant to underscore the mood for a body of work that explores the disproportionate amount of violence that Black people suffer in the US and elsewhere. And seeing Wiley explore those themes in sculpture, it dawns that Black people aren’t really ever enshrined in bronze outside of a sports hall of fame. And yet a quiet strength resonates from the impotence Wiley has on display.
“That’s one of the reasons I want people to walk into this exhibition,” he said. “There are so many emotions because it’s not costume. This is something that’s much more approachable, something you could actually imagine yourself living through. This is skin.”
Wiley ends the exhibition with a bang: the titular Archeology of Silence, a 17.5-ft-tall statue of a fallen Black man draped across a horse, the largest installation the de Young has ever displayed. The piece quotes an actual statue of the Confederate army general JEB Stuart that stood for 113 years on the famed Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, which is where Wiley first saw it. In 2020, he opened his Confederate statue rebuttal with Rumors of War. That statement, a 27-ft-tall statue of a Black man riding high in streetwear, was revealed in Times Square before moving to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a mile from the Stuart statue.
Harlem beginnings
Wiley’s always had a talent for mischief. As a kid, he made a hustle out of painting watercolors from snapshots of his teachers’ dogs and cats. “My mom was a single parent with six kids,” he says. “And while she was highly educated she chose to create a kind of Sanford and Sons environment for us where we were hauling antique furniture around and learning Spanish selling clothes to the Mexican community.”
It was while in residence at Harlem’s Studio Museum that Wiley landed on the world stage, his noble recreations of Black men in police mugshots announcing him as an incisive new voice. For his early portraits Wiley plucked models from the streets of Harlem before stretching his recruiting net to Rio, Dakar and Mumbai. But for his most well-known portrait, it was one of the world’s most famous men who effectively picked him off the street.
Renowned in his own time
There is no bigger job for a Black American artist than painting the Black president’s official portrait. And Barack Obama arguably understood the fraught socio-political implications of that historic moment far better than Wiley who, like the president, is the son of African immigrants, Ivy League-educated and came of age living and working in uptown New York. “Most of your paintings are of people minding their own business,” Obama told Wiley in the interview process. “People who aren’t celebrated on museum walls. Well, I’m the real thing. What are you gonna do about that?”
Wiley doesn’t remember what he said in response, but it was enough to land the job. The final product features Obama on the edge of his seat with his arms folded – a pose Wiley caught between takes. The president is set against a lush ivy wall that holds pops of colorful flowers: chrysanthemum for Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago, jasmine for his native Hawaii and African blue lilies for his late Kenyan father.
The portrait, which brought a million more viewers to the National Portrait Gallery within a year of its 2018 unveiling, cemented Wiley as a living artist renowned in his own time – the rare crossover star who impresses the fine art world while staying true to the streets. But he wasn’t about to be boxed in by his signature work. “I mean, it’s going to be on my fucking tombstone,” Wiley said. “It’s a cool high water mark. It inspires me to constantly push the envelope and to do things that are bigger.”
The bolder Wiley goes with his forensic explorations of the Black experience, the bigger lightning rod he becomes for criticism. Snobs see his work as little more than a skilled remix, while conservative commentators see reverse racism in every brushstroke. Never mind that it would take a loupe to find any trace of bristling on his canvases.
When the North Carolina Museum of Art purchased Wiley’s Judith Beheading Holofernes in 2012, an oil painting that depicts a stylish Black woman holding the severed heads of white women, the museum was swamped with scolding social media posts, many asking conservators how they would feel if the races were reversed. Sean Hannity promoted a blogpost that claimed to find “secret sperm” embedded in the Obama portrait. All the while the Black manosphere knocks Wiley for being gay and playing with Black masculinity.
But Wiley pours gasoline on the firebrands – calling Judith, a Bible reference rendered many times over, “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing” and a severed head of “one of my assistants”. When one guest on his de Young exhibition tour asks him about the hypermasculine reaction to Jonathan Majors’s “villains and heroes” themed Ebony magazine cover, Wiley breaks into a Cheshire grin. “Artists are tricksters,” he says. “The ultimate goal of a trickster is to say, ‘You think you know what something is, but let me show you the inverse.’”
Braced for criticism
Probably, there will be similar outrage for Archeology of Science, which was Wiley’s way of working through the social justice movement while riding out the pandemic in Senegal where he sourced new models for this exhibition. He never thought he’d see the day when the news outlets on his ancestral continent covered his native homeland with the same sense of panic and scorn western journalists only seem to reserve for Africa. “America justifiably was looking like a steaming pile,” Wiley said, “and I was looking from an arm’s distance knowing how dreadful it would’ve been here and knowing that I was spared a lot of spiritual and emotional damage. I mean, I had some of my white friends tell me without irony that they felt as though they were living in a third world country and they wished they were in Africa with me.”
The de Young exhibition is slated to run through mid-October. Thanks in part to a $1m grant from Google, the museum will be able to provide free access to the exhibition on eight weekends in an effort to reach more of the local community. Wanda Johnson, the mother of Bay Area Rapid Transit police shooting victim Oscar Grant, is among a coterie of local activists Wiley drafted to help him elucidate the meaning of his work. Where another artist might let the viewer arrive at their own conclusions, Wiley tells you exactly what he meant to say. “It isn’t always the case, but we realize it’s important to provide context,” says the de Young Museum interpretation director, Abram Jackson, “especially as we’re an institution that has an anti-racist commitment.”
More criticism will probably come along with the museum’s open-minded approach, too. But exhibition curator Claudia Schmuckli, who pleaded with Wiley to bring Archeology of Silence to the states after previewing it at last year’s Venice Biennale, isn’t bothered. “We’re braced for every possible reaction at this point.”
It’s enough to make you think Wiley could have had an easier time – if not exactly a booming career – if he didn’t take things so personal; if he painted, say, landscapes or fruit. “But it would be impossible for me to paint just a landscape. Because if I start painting landscapes, then I start thinking about the history of landscapes. I start thinking about the desire to paint spaces as a means of picturing them for colonial conquest, which is why so much landscape stuff is out there. I start thinking about the naturalist who would go out and make botanical studies and animal studies. I start thinking about the Hudson River school, which was then turned into this notion of the grand, sublime, religious, rapturous way one can relate to nature. It’s a bunch of avoidance.”
