59 Facts About Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley was born on February 28,1977 and is an American portrait painter based in New York City.

Kehinde Wiley is known for his naturalistic paintings of black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings.

In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Kehinde Wiley noted that his brother was better at portraiture than he was, and this fueled a sense of competition between them.

Kehinde Wiley returned to Nigeria upon finishing his studies, leaving Freddie to raise the couple's six children on her own.

At the age of 20, Kehinde Wiley traveled to Nigeria to meet his father and explore his family roots.

In 1999, Kehinde Wiley earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kehinde Wiley received a scholarship to attend the Yale University School of Art, and completed his MFA at Yale in 2001.

Kehinde Wiley received an honorary DFA from Yale University in 2024.

Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter who paints monumental works of art that captivate audiences with bold colors and strong views on racial power.

Kehinde Wiley is one of many contemporary artists throughout the world who hopes to shift racial power throughout the media using his art.

When he was commissioned to paint the former President of the United States at that time, Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley became even more popular, showing his art in multiple international shows and exhibiting in places like Cuba, Nigeria, and Los Angeles.

When later commenting on his fascination with the mugshot and its influence in his art, Kehinde Wiley noted that when he found it on the street, it altered his view of what portraiture could be and solidified his feelings about the portrayal of black men in the world.

Kehinde Wiley saw that there was something lacking in this portrayal and turned to his background in classical paintings.

Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War is a bronze sculpture that commemorates African American youth lost to the social and political battles being waged throughout the nation.

Kehinde Wiley chooses countries that he believes are on the "conversation block" in the 21st century to be represented in The World Stage.

In October 2017, it was announced that Kehinde Wiley had been chosen by Barack Obama to paint an official portrait of the former president to appear in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery "America's Presidents" exhibition.

Kehinde Wiley recalled a moment of repose in between shots when Obama was essentially as he is depicted in the portrait, a pose the artist felt was authentic to Obama.

Kehinde Wiley explained that Obama and the foreground of the plants are battling over who takes the primary space in the portrait, which Kehinde Wiley hoped would communicate that Obama is more central than just his story and experiences that helped contour his life.

President Obama felt that Kehinde Wiley's work was able to elevate an ordinary person to look like royalty and to lift them up so that they belong as a part of American life, reflecting Obama's belief that politics should be about the country unfolding from the bottom up and not the other way around.

Kehinde Wiley mentioned in the unveiling of Obama's portrait that he went to museums in Los Angeles and noticed that there weren't many artworks that display African Americans; he wanted to change that.

Kehinde Wiley hoped that one day the artworks that he creates can inspire future African American generations who look up at the museum wall and see someone who looks like them being displayed at the museum, especially the portrait of the first Black American president.

Kehinde Wiley revisited this idea after visiting Richmond, Virginia, where he became interested in the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue and the idea of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy existing within a modern "hipster" town.

Kehinde Wiley had a retrospective in 2016 at the Seattle Art Museum.

Kehinde Wiley opened a studio in Beijing, China, in 2006 to use several helpers to do brushstrokes for his paintings.

Critics have long wondered about the extent to which Kehinde Wiley's paintings are painted by Kehinde Wiley himself.

Kehinde Wiley is an accomplished painter, though far less successful commercially.

In 2021, Kehinde Wiley's work Go became a permanent for Penn Station's concourse in New York City.

Kehinde Wiley curated a group show of African arts featuring Nigerian artist Oluwole Omofemi at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles.

Kehinde Wiley depicts his slightly larger than life-size figures in a heroic manner, giving them poses that connote power and spiritual awakening.

Kehinde Wiley "investigates the perception of blackness and creates a contemporary hybrid Olympus in which tradition is invested with a new street credibility".

Kehinde Wiley's portraits are based on photographs of young men whom Wiley sees on the street.

Kehinde Wiley has painted men from Harlem's 125th Street, as well as the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was born.

Kehinde Wiley describes his approach as "interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit".

Kehinde Wiley's art has been described as having homoerotic qualities.

Kehinde Wiley has used a sperm motif as symbolic of masculinity and gender.

Kehinde Wiley depicted the rapper Ice T as Napoleon and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five as a Dutch Civic guard company from the 17th century.

Kehinde Wiley said about this work: "It's sort of a play on the 'kill whitey' thing".

Kehinde Wiley emphasizes features of his Black figures that eroticizes them in a way women were traditionally portrayed.

Kehinde Wiley focuses on their bodies, includes motifs like sperm that reference their vitality, and poses them in vulnerable positions.

The patterns of lace and flowers are often associated with femininity and by submerging his male figures in these ornate backgrounds, Kehinde Wiley acknowledges the beauty and youth of his subjects.

Kehinde Wiley is creating a portrayal of African American men that is not often seen in the media today.

The original backdrops of the classical portraits Kehinde Wiley uses for his references are full of sweeping estates, their families, and other possessions.

Kehinde Wiley instead creates detailed backgrounds full of bright patterns that at times enter the foreground in front of the figures.

Kehinde Wiley's intent is to create a background that just like his figures is competing to be noticed and blend the two in order to elevate the figures.

The original portraits that Kehinde Wiley recreates would have hung in lavish homes of the wealthy amongst other extremely detailed ornaments to further enhance the wealth of the homeowners.

Kehinde Wiley received Canteen magazine's Artist of the Year Award.

Two of Kehinde Wiley's paintings were featured on the top of 500 New York City taxi cabs in early 2011 as a collaboration with the Art Production Fund.

Kehinde Wiley is featured in a commercial on the USA Network as a 2010 Character Honoree.

Kehinde Wiley's work was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Recognize exhibit in 2008.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, was a retrospective at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in the summer of 2016.

Kehinde Wiley denied the accusations, stating that the two had been in a "brief, consensual relationship".

Lawyers for Kehinde Wiley sent Awuah-Darko a cease and desist letter demanding the removal of his "categorically false and defamatory" Instagram posts.

Kehinde Wiley's representatives shared a series of text messages between the two men, which they said had been sent in the months after the alleged assault, in which Awuah-Darko asked to meet Kehinde Wiley again.

Richards claimed that Kehinde Wiley had groped him on a date in 2019.

Armistead accused Kehinde Wiley of groping him and "performing forced oral penetration" during a 2010 encounter at Kehinde Wiley's apartment.

Kehinde Wiley denied ever meeting Armistead and disputed certain elements of Armistead's story.

Several art museums said they would suspend or cancel their plans to host future exhibitions from Kehinde Wiley, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Joslyn Art Museum.

Kehinde Wiley has kept his personal life private but identifies as a gay man.