All about identity

Race on canvas

Kehinde Wiley began thinking about the stereotypes that shadow black men long before events in Ferguson, Missouri, pushed the phrase “unarmed black man” back into the headlines and inaugurated a new wave of the civil rights movement.

“I know how young black men are seen,” he said. “They’re boys, scared little boys oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.” He grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and was 14 when four white police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King; riots flared in the neighbourhood.

Now 37, Wiley is one of the most celebrated painters of his generation. He is known for vibrant, photo-based portraits of young black men (and occasionally women) who are the opposite of scared — they gaze out at us coolly, their images mashed up with rococo-style frills and empowering poses culled from art history. As a self-described gay man and the son of an African-American mother and a Nigerian father, he offers a model of the artist as multicultural itinerant.

Gaining ground

At the moment, Wiley’s work seems to be everywhere, from the set of the Fox drama Empire to all of the right institutions. A Wiley painting is easy to recognise. More often than not, it shows a solitary figure, an attractive man in his 20s, enacting a scene from an old-master painting.

Dressed in contemporary garb — a hooded sweatshirt, perhaps, or a Denver Broncos jersey — the man might be crossing the Swiss Alps on horseback with the brio of Napoleon or glancing upward, prophet-style, golden light encircling his head. Typically the man has a lean frame, and his clear skin gives off a coppery sheen. His posture is regal: shoulders rolled back, head turned slightly to reveal the elegant sweep of a jawline.

Every Wiley painting is a two-punch affair — the masculine figures contrast sharply with the ornately patterned, Skittles-bright backdrops unfurling behind them. Based on design sources as varied as Victorian wallpaper and Renaissance tapestries, the backgrounds can look as if thousands of curling petals had somehow been blown into geometric formations across the canvas. For the moment depicted in the painting, the men are protected and invincible, inhabiting an Arcadian realm far removed from the grit of the artist’s childhood.

Wiley’s champions tend to view his work in overt political terms. He redresses the absence of nonwhite faces in museum masterpieces, “using the power of images to remedy the historical invisibility of black men and women,” as Eugenie Tsai, the curator of the Brooklyn Museum show, observes in the accompanying catalog.

But you can also read his work in psychological terms, and Wiley himself emphasises the never-ending tension in the paintings between their male and female aspects. “It’s about a figure in the landscape,” he said of his output, adding that the backdrops symbolise the land. “For me, the landscape is the irrational. Nature is the woman. Nature is the black, the brown, the other.” He added, “That’s the logic behind it, but everyone has their own sort of reading.”

The artist said he never met his father during his childhood or even saw a photograph of him. Isaiah D Obot — a Nigerian citizen who came to the US as a scholarship student — returned to Africa after finishing his studies. He went on to have a second family in Nigeria and a substantial career in city planning.

The artist’s mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, a Texas native, studied linguistics and eventually became a teacher. Kehinde was the fifth of her six children, and a twin. For most of his childhood, he said, the family subsisted on welfare checks and whatever spare change came in from his mother’s thrift shop.

The store didn’t have a sign or a retail space, other than a patch of sidewalk in front of the house on West Jefferson Avenue. But everyone in the neighbourhood thought of it as Freddie’s Store. Wiley recalls the mounds of merchandise: used books, windup Victrolas, tarnished gold-leaf picture frames, porcelain figurines of rosy-cheeked lovers.

“It was like Sanford and Son,” he said, referring to the ‘70s sitcom about two men with a salvage shop, “junk everywhere.”The children would help their mother scout for inventory, driving around in a Dodge van that backfired noisily. “That was the more embarrassing part,” he recalled. He added, “You’re 11, and you don’t want to be seen jumping out to go through your neighbour’s garbage. That’s social death!”

Introduction to art

At 11, everything changed. His mom enrolled him in a free art course at a state college. Suddenly, he knew how he wanted to spend his life; his career unfolded with remarkable velocity. He attended college at the San Francisco Art Institute, before winning a scholarship to Yale. He arrived in New York in 2001 as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Since then, Wiley has “street-cast” his paintings, heading out to scout for models — initially along jammed sidewalks in Harlem and, later, when he had enough money, overseas, in China, Israel and elsewhere.

Serendipity on canvas

His paintings all begin with an exchange of glances between artist and subject. Wiley describes the process as “this serendipitous thing where I am in the streets running into people who resonate with me, whether for cultural or sexual reasons. My type is rooted in my own sexual desire.”

He added, with amusement, “Most people turn me down.” The willing few are instructed to come to his studio to pose for photographs that serve as source material for the portraits.

Wiley has his share of critics who say his work is formulaic and repetitive. Whether he’s working in oil or watercolour, he deploys the same strategy of inserting dark-skinned figures into white masterpieces of the past.

He has, in fact, varied his subjects over the years. In 2012, for his debut show at the Sean Kelly Gallery, he added women to his roster of models. Wiley has also ventured into sculpture, and his coming show at the Brooklyn Museum will include six stained-glass windows as well as a few bronze heads that can put you in mind of the portrait busts of Jean-Antoine Houdon, who flourished during the French Enlightenment.

“I am interested in evolution within my thinking,” he said. “I am not interested in the evolution of my paint. If I made buttery, thick paintings, there would be critics of that. You just have to proceed.”