Geoff: Kehinde Wiley is
best-known for his distinctive
portrait of Barack Obama.
But Wiley has spent most of his
career painting vibrant
portrayals of everyday
African-American men and women.
A new exhibition of his work
focuses on grief and mourning.
And also ask whose lives have
value.
Jeffrey brown traveled to San
Francisco for our arts and
culture series, canvas.
>> A monumental painting, 25
feet long.
A young black man twisted in a
colorful floral field.
A contemporary image of grief
and death that also evokes the
history of image making itself.
>> There's a tradition and I
love the tradition of painting
that comes from western Europe.
I've spent much of my life
learning it and trying to master
it. And in a lot of that stuff I
see sadness, but I also see
dignity and respect. I see
people looking at the life of
Christ or the life of a fallen
soldier and valuing their lives
so much to make really great,
beautiful works of art out of
it.
I wanted to use that language
and turn it towards people who
look like me.
>> The exhibition "An archeology
, of silence" at San Francisco's
de young museum dramatic in its
scale and lighting presents
paintings and sculptures, 25
works in all, that use the
iconography of art history to
expose violence against black
men and women today.
An ancient sculpture, "The dying
Gaul", from 200 B.C. Now a young
man in a hoodie, taking his last
breaths.
The virgin martyr St. Cecilia, a
1610 marble sculpturenow
transformed by Wiley into a
large painting of a contemporary
woman.
The pain, but also the passion
and power so often captured in
the history of western religious
art and portraiture.
>> I'm telling a story about a
group of people who for
centuries have been ignored and
forgotten.
And I'm using the language of
the epic, the heroic, even the
elegiac, the sort of sadness
that surrounds a lot of these
big monuments, to be able to
make someone feel special again,
to make someone feel fully
formed, mourned after. I don't
know is it a sad show or is
there something here that says
that there's a bit of growth and
a bit of light in the midst of
all this sadness?
>> I wonder myself. What do you see?
You are the crater here.
>> That's right.
I guess what I'm doing is
creating a provocation.
>> Today one of the world's most
celebrated artists in part for
for his 2018 portrait of Barack
Obama the 46-year old Wiley
grew up in south central los
Angeles, one of six children
raised by his mother, Freddie
Mae Wiley. He credits her and
public, tuition-free art
programs (including one that
sent him to Russia at age 12)
For both encouraging his talents
and allowing him to first see
famed artworks of the past.
After graduating from the San
Francisco art institute and
Yale's master of fine arts
program, he quickly became an
art-world star, known for
putting ordinary black men and
women into the ´historical'
frame, often finding his
´models' through what he calls
"Street-casting" approaching
people on the street to ask if
he can paint them.
Wiley spent much of the pandemic
in Senegal, where he's
established a studio and arts
residency program.
The works in "An archeology of
silence" were mostly painted
there, using local residents as
models. .
>> The whole point here, I
suppose, is domination, that the
painting dominates, that it
subsumes you, it consumes you.
>> One thing he was concerned
with here: Heroic scale. But
also: The small details of a
life.
>> It's about every small detail
that goes into a person's day to
day, how they adorn themselves
in the morning and how they
dress themselves.
And this is simply slowing down
and paying attention to every
single detail of a life, every
single crease and fold of a
hand, every single hair
follicle. Precious.
>> Again, Wiley has in mind old
masters paintings.
>> Look at old Dutch paintings
and those collars and all of
this. But really what you are
looking at are powerful men who
wanted to be seen powerful, and
go the best artists of their
generation to make that happen.
I want to be the best artist of
my generation. I'm working my
ass off to technically get there
but also to scour the world and
find interesting subject matter.
And I think the subject matter
that most interests me is the
story of people who were
oftentimes ignored. (And you
don't have to go far and wide to
find that. All you have to do is
slow down and look around you.)
>> Wiley has also taken this
idea into the very public realm
of monuments but his hero on
horseback is a contemporary
African American man wearing
Nikes. "Rumors of war" was first
shown in New York's Times
square, before being given a
permanent home in Richmond,
Virginia, near that city's famed
but controversial confederate
monuments.
>> I remember looking at some of
those confederate sculptures
down in Virginia and being
absolutely, number one,
horrififd.
Number two, enthralled. And
number three, inspired.
>> Inspired to do what?
>> Inspired to have my response
to it, inspired to be able to
hack that language of power and
control, that language of
domination and, and terror.
Sheer terror.
>> Take what you see there and
--
>> Deconstructed.
Shoot it out in a different
form.
Shoot out in a loving form.
Shoot it out in a way that says,
´there's got to be more than
this.'
>> He's created a new version of
this in his current show: A
huge bronze horse, but this time
with a fallen black rider.
It is all part of playing with
past, present stereotypes and
, realities.
You referred to yourself as a
trickster?
>> I think every artist is in a
way. A type of alchemy, if it were.
As though we know the received
world, the one that we're
handed, where black men are seen
as antisocial, a propensity
towards sports, a hyper
sexuality.
And then we take these monstrous
images and we breathe life into
them.
We try to create something
that's actually, that's a bit
tricky, a bit magical. It's an
unfortunate state of affairs in
which creating a corrective lens
for the world you occupy is the
magic but I think that's where
.
We are.
>> Kehinde Wiley's exhibition
"An archeology of silence" is up
through October 15th.
For the pbs newshour, I'm
Jeffrey brown at the de young