I was standing in a room of screaming giants whose voices were in their postures. Every wall in the gallery burst with color of young African American men treated as majestic figures – with eyes that were altogether proud, daring and haunting.
Artist Kehinde Wiley had re-constructed them as aristocratic figures, and placed them against beautiful tapestries that both surrounded and entangled them. These were not the images of black teens you so often see on the evening news running from cops, or handcuffed and escorted to a paddy wagon. These were images of men who rode as Napoleon or reclined as Morpheus.
I saw these powerful images at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in an exhibition of works by Wiley titled “A New Republic.” The exhibit ends on May 24, and will travel to Fort Worth, Seattle and Richmond, VA.
If you watched the Fox hit TV show “Empire” and honed in on the artwork in the mansion of Lucious Lyon, played by Terrence Howard, you saw Wiley’s paintings. I recalled one scene in which Lyon actually stopped at Wiley’s “Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” and mentioned something about it – which I do not remember now – to his young son’s older girlfriend, played by Naomi Campbell, whom he wanted out of his son’s life.
When I first saw the paintings on the show, I wasn’t struck by them, but I was curious about the artist and wanted to see the works in person. The artworks up-close have a feel-good aura about them.
Wiley, 38, first pulled together these paintings by asking young men on the streets of Harlem to pose for him. Most of the works are of young men, but now he’s also creating ones of black women. One of the most beautiful entries in the exhibit is a bronze sculpture of three women whose hair is conjoined over their heads.
At his studio, Wiley asked the men to choose a figure from an art book whom they would like to be modeled after in a painting. He took photos of the young men dressed in their T-shirts and Converse sneakers, their Hanes underwear and Timberland boots, and then painted them as classically as the men in the old art paintings.
Wiley grew up in South Central Los Angeles and first went to art school at age 11, he said on his website. In art school, he said, he “just liked being able to make stuff look like other stuff.” He attended the Art Institute of San Francisco where he focused on the technical skills, and at Yale, where he focused on art as political expression, among other issues. After Yale, he got a residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem, where he seemingly found his niche.
He says he is inspired by the classical paintings of Europeans, but he obviously puts his own imprint on them. On his website, he described his work:
“I take the figure out of its original environment and place it in something completely made up. Most of the backgrounds I end up using are sheer decorative devices. Things that come from things like wallpaper or the architectural façade ornamentation of a building, and in a way it robs the painting of any sense of place or location, and it’s located strictly in an area of the decorative.”
For me, the decorative backgrounds of his paintings were as bold the men themselves in paintings that were 9 feet and more tall.
Along with his men of Harlem, Wiley has also created a series called “The World Stage,” where he gathered young men from the streets of other countries, including Nigeria, Brazil and India, and put them through the same process.
Here are thumbnails of some of the paintings in the exhibit. Click on the thumbnail to see the full photo. And if you’re anywhere near Brooklyn or the other cities along the exhibit’s route, be sure to check it out. You can’t feel the breadth of the paintings unless you’re in the room with them.
