Kehinde Wiley

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 in California. His mother enrolled him in art classes when he was 11, and he later attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. In 1999, he completed his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He received his MFA in 2001 from the Yale School of Art and became an Artist-in-Residence in 2002 at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Most recently, Wiley received the Medal of Arts in 2015 from the U.S. Department of State. In 2018, his portrait of President Barack Obama was added to the permanent installation of presidential portraits in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In the same year, he was also awarded a W.E.B. Du Bois medal for his significant contributions to African and African-American history and culture and his advocacy for intercultural understanding and human rights. Wiley lives and works in Beijing and New York.

A contemporary descendant of portraitists such as Reynolds, Titian, Ingres, Gainsborough, and Constable, Wiley initially created portraits based on photographs of young men in Harlem. Over time, however, his work adopted a more international view and featured models from Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar, and Rio de Janeiro. His figurative paintings and sculptures combine traditional and contemporary modes of representation and present young, urban, black and brown men as heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime to critique notions of masculinity and physicality that are attributed to them.