![]() ![]() Wiley seemed to gain confidence with each encounter. No longer just painting power, he’s building it. Now, following the success of Black Rock Senegal, a lavish arts residency he’s established in Dakar-soon to be joined by a second location, in Nigeria-Wiley is shifting the art world’s center of gravity toward Africa with a determination that combines the institution-founding fervor of Booker T. Washington and the stagecraft of Willy Wonka. He was already collected by Alicia Keys and the Smithsonian when his official portrait of Obama, unveiled in 2018, sparked a nationwide pilgrimage. “Every single person that’s around is winning some cosmic game.”įew have won bigger than Wiley, whose good fortune has taken him from an enfant terrible of the early two-thousands, when he became known for transfiguring hip-hop style into the idiom of the Old Masters, to one of the most influential figures in global Black culture. “In every male ejaculate there’s a possibility to populate an entire city like New York,” he told me in one of our conversations, alluding to the golden sperm that adorned his career-making portraits of young men in Harlem. A mother in New York might become Judith holding the head of Holofernes a dreamy Senegalese youth, Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” The artist revels in embodying chance, the butterfly effect that leads from everyday life to gilt-framed immortality. Wiley’s portraits single out ordinary Black people for color-saturated canonization, turning spontaneous encounters on streets across the world into dates with art-historical destiny. ![]() He’d do the sitting free, for the love of beauty. There was even a man who was offended by the artist’s fee. “I’m a superstar to my mom,” she replied. “A lot of it is by chance, not because you’re some superstar,” Wiley said. ![]() He played it cooler with a willowy young woman named Emerance, who was sitting on a railing with a glass of red wine. ![]() “No, you have to show up and decide,” Wiley said. “Hood stuff, basically,” another flung back. They subjected the artist to a raucous sidewalk interrogation. The very image of an unflappable sapeur-Congolese French for “dandy”-he was still so excited by Wiley’s attention that he dragged him off to meet a group of friends. “I’m an artist and you’re a work of art,” he told a man named Patrick, who was sipping a beer in sunglasses and a fur-trimmed leather coat. Wiley excels at the pickup line, a crucial ingredient in a practice that parallels cruising. Everybody knew that face-but who was this painter, coming on like a hustler in the city of spies and chocolatiers? He explained his background to a candidate from Congo: “My father is Nigerian, my mother is American, and I’m lost.” But he also felt certain that those who walked past would eventually see his work and have a different reaction: “Holy shit, I missed out on that?”Īmong the people whom Wiley did persuade, the clincher was often his Presidential portrait of Barack Obama, confidently seated before a flowering wall of greenery. Rejection keeps him humble, the artist insisted. Wiley took a drag from his cigarette-Benson & Hedges, the brand he’s smoked since high school-and then waved his assistant, cameraman, and studio manager down the block. Another prospect not only refused but ejected Wiley from a multistory complex of barbershops and wig emporiums, jabbing him in the chest with an indignant forefinger as he warned that it was no place for an artist. “It’s your portrait,” Wiley assured one skeptic. Others wanted to know if they could dress as they pleased. It was early April, still freezing in the medieval city that Charles Baudelaire thought full of “everything bland, everything sad, flavorless, asleep.” On the Chaussée de Wavre, a busy street lined with ads for cheap wire transfers and “100% Brazilian Hair,” many responded warily to the artist’s invitation. For those who stopped, Wiley produced an exhibition catalogue, flipping through pages of classically posed portraits with models who were Black like them. Most passersby ignored him or gave excuses: jobs, parking meters, and even a preference for being pictured exclusively from behind. In nearly fluent French, he explained that he wanted to paint them, and offered to pay three hundred euros if they came in for a photo shoot the following afternoon. He sidled up to strangers in an orange hoodie and lime-green Air Jordans, extending a hand and flashing a gap-toothed grin. Soliciting pedestrians in the Matongé neighborhood of Brussels, Kehinde Wiley, forty-five, looked more like a sidewalk canvasser than he did a world-famous artist. ![]()
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