Kehinde Wiley

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

Wiley chose Brazil, Nigeria, India, and China because they are all "points of anxiety and curiosity and production" to the world.

As Wiley has traveled around the world, he has noticed that many people around the world interact with the American culture and the Black American expression.

As he continues to paint models from streets around the world, he is increasingly painting them not based on Western painting anymore, but art from these countries that have a wealth of history.

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

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.

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

Kehinde Wiley (born February 28, 1977) is an American portrait painter based in New York City known for his naturalistic paintings of Black people that reference the work of Old Master paintings.

Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1977.

His father, Isaiah D. Obot, is Ibibio, from Nigeria, and his mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, is African-American.

He has a twin brother.

In his childhood, Wiley's mother wanted her children to stay out of the streets and so she encouraged an interest in art through enrollment in after-school art classes.

At the age of 11, Wiley and his brother were selected with 48 other children to study briefly at an art conservatory near St. Petersburg in Russia.

It was there that Wiley developed his passion for portraiture.

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

The siblings would compete to see who could recreate the most realistic images.

Upon his return to the US, Wiley continued studying art and attended high school at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Wiley and his siblings were raised by their mother, Freddie Mae Wiley.

Their father, Isaiah D. Obot, was a Nigerian student who came to the US on scholarship.

He returned to Nigeria upon finishing his studies,[12] leaving Freddie to raise the couple's six children on her own.[13] Wiley has said that his family survived on welfare checks and the limited income earned by his mother's "thrift store"—which consisted of a patch of sidewalk outside their home.[14] At the age of 20, Wiley traveled to Nigeria to meet his father and explore his family roots.[15]

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

In 2001, he received a scholarship to complete his MFA at Yale University School of Art.

In art school, Wiley attributed his most important lesson to focusing on creating art that he truly wanted to make—not art that his professors wanted him to make.

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The beginnings of Wiley's now-famous portraits can be traced back to his time in Harlem, New York, during his residency at the Studio Museum.

It was at this time he came upon a crumpled mugshot released by the New York Police Department.

On it was a photo of an African American man in his twenties with his basic personal information in order for the man to be identified.

Wiley held onto this mugshot that would inspire some of his future work, such as Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence), as well as a recreation of this mugshot in Mugshot Study (2006, Plate 8).

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

Wiley saw that there was something lacking.

He then turned to his background in classical paintings and began to compare this new type of portraiture to the ones he studied from the eighteenth century.

This would spark inspiration in Wiley and lead to him creating a combination of his new modern portraiture and the classic ones from history.

Although Wiley's portraits were initially based on photographs of young men from the streets of Harlem, Wiley began to expand to an international view, including models found in urban backdrops from around the world – including Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro.

This immense body of work became known as, "The World Stage."

Models are dressed in their everyday clothing and asked to assume poses found in artwork from their location's history.

It's a juxtaposition of "the 'old' inherited by the 'new' – who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak."

Wiley says this instantly sparks a conversation that is equally emotional as it is intellectual.

The Columbus Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007 and describes his paintings as "heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."

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

Wiley was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.