Artist Interview: Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley : I completed the hip-hop honors body of work in 2005, and that commission came as a bit of a different part of my practice. Generally what I try to do with my practice is to find models from the street, complete strangers who don't necessarily fall into that typical portrait sitting set,

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which is to say that most of the great portraits from the past that I really admire in paintings have to do with people who are very powerful and wealthy, and who used the portrait as an occasion, a very important social occasion, of having their picture put down in time.

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In my work, I'm actually taking very chance moments, and turning that into a heroic moment.

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Taking possibly the complete opposite of what those original works were based on and turning an entire lifetime of power and dominance in the world in on its face and actually taking an entire moment of absolute chance and making that the big picture.

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When I was invited to do the hip-hop honors paintings it was an opportunity to move almost in a different direction but I think in the same direction in some really crucial ways.

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And what I mean by that is to say that by using the language of portraiture and the way that it's evolved over time into how to describe someone heroic, how to describe someone powerful,

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and then taking some of the possibly most celebrated individuals in Black American popular culture but possibly not celebrated to the extent to which they should,

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I'm allowing the language of that heroicism to then be drawn within that idiom.

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I focused on male portraits in the last five years of my career because I think it's really important to go for the jugular when it comes to investigating a language or a system that's evolved over time.

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And I do think that painting by and large has to do with a type of propaganda act, and the propaganda propagated in this work has to do with dominance.

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If you go to the Louvre and look at some of the great Angs and Davids hanging you'll see the most amazing depictions of national presence and national power.

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The war pictures are quite amazing. But you'll also see personal portraits if you look at some of the greatest British protraiture the 18th century for example you will see landed gentry who are showing off themselves stridently, but also their land and all their possessions behind them in equal measure perhaps cattle, perhaps children, perhaps wives, all these seen as possession

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And I think in some sense I am sort of interrogating the notion of this sort of alpha male subjective painting.

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Now once, at once, I am certainly embracing that and critiquing it but also trying to go beyond any type of polemic and find someplace of pleasure and joy and really trying to go back to that moment when I was a child when I first started looking at

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Kehinde Wiley : painting from this period and seeing that there was something that was redeeming in it, something that was truly, uh, remarkable about the act of creating illusion, the art of fabricating this type of propaganda.

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It's all boys, it's all power, it's all consumption, it's all imperialism, it's all dominance, and it's by design. That's this body of work.

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FEMALE VOICE: You know, I noticed that several of the Hip-Hop Honors portraits have identifying crests and heraldry or other objects that were added after the paintings were featured during VH1's Hip-Hop Honors show in September 2005.

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They also have their roots in traditional western portraiture, but the details are particular to each subject. Could you talk about those?

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Kehinde Wiley : Uh, the details that you'll see in many of the paintings that are borrowed from use heraldry and regalia in the same ways that you'll see in the Hip-Hop Honors paintings.

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Now there's some crucial differences: In the Hip-Hop Honors paintings the artists themselves were asked to choose some of the elements that were in there.

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For instance, with LL Cool J we took out some elements and we threw in some elements that he requested, such as things that signify his practice as a musician.

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But so much of heraldry has to do with not only individual agency, but your family's mark in the world, and it has to do with the ways in which we (I'm speaking as the sitter), we have amassed power as a group, historically, and how we stand within the group.

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And so in that sense, the heraldry and the regalia that you see in these paintings is so much more about, not only the sitter, but it's about who that family is, what that family means to the society that's looking at that painting, and how that family can be viewed throughout time.

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In my paintings, perhaps we don't take these things so seriously.

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Perhaps we don't have the same rules surrounding heraldry and those types of signs and signatures, but it is something that I try to sort of at once embrace and poke fun at in my paintings.

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Brandon Fortune: Now, this is a really broad question, please feel free to answer it in any way you would like. How has the culture of hip-hop impacted you and your art?

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Kehinde Wiley : The culture of hip-hop is something that is impossible, ultimately, to define.

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I've recently have been doing a number of trips to, in some ways, take the cultural temperature of Black American presence throughout the world.

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And you see it responded to in places like Brazil and places like West Africa, Turkey, China, India, Thailand, all of which I've spent time this summer simply going through and asking these sorts of questions surrounding Black American culture and its presence in the world.

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And what I found so increasingly is that Black American culture is as varied globally as it is here, at home.

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And so when I try to create a response to a question around what hip-hop is, and how it figures in my own personal practice, it's global.

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And that's one of the reasons you see my shows having characters from all corners of the globe.

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Um, I'm embracing the fullness of the culture that began as a political act, an act of reformation and confirmation of who we are in the world, in the South Bronx, in the '70s.

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And now that's gone on and gone so well and so successfully that you'll be in the streets of Tokyo, or in the streets of Dakar and see elements of that reverberated.

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Brandon Fortune: What are your thoughts about showing your paintings with their references to power and authority in the context of the National Portrait Gallery and its collections?

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And does this in any way relate to your experience with the Columbus Project in the Columbus Museum of Art, or not?

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I'm particularly interested in what you think about your work in the context of the Portrait Gallery.

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Kehinde Wiley : What I do is I create high-price luxury goods for wealthy consumers and many of my paintings draw upon the language of power and domination in a way that both critiques it, but participates in exactly what they're about.

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And I think it's really important to see institutions, such as museums and galleries, as consensus builders. What we do culturally is we say that these things matter over time because we as a state, we as a people decide that they matter.

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We decide that this is a viewpoint that we espouse as a society. And my work is not to provide answers or any easy didactic. My work is simply to ask a series of questions that come about because I've been drawn that way in my life.

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I've been pushed in certain ways, such is to say that I've studied painting as a young child; I love it, but I'm also critical of it. I love great institutions that say, as a nation this is who we are.

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But in the act of doing that sort of editing, does that not leave out certain points of view?

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Often times what we'll see in what we call post-modern society is that what we traditionally call the centers, have now been pushed out of the center and new voices have been welcomed there.

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By and large, the center has the power that the center has always had.

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But I do think that it's really important and really exciting that the peripheral voices that were once pushed onto the edges are now being welcomed into institutions like the National Portrait Gallery.

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Brandon Fortune: One last question, I read just recently that you might be showing a series of works that you had done in West Africa, perhaps as early as this coming fall, and I'm just wondering what's next for you on the exhibition schedule?

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Could you share that with us?

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Kehinde Wiley : Sure. Sure.

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This coming fall, and this summer actually, I'll be launching the first of my West Africa Paintings.

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I've created a new series of paintings that has me traveling across the world looking at world culture, youth culture; a demographic between the ages of 18 and 35.

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A very specific group that's consumed with American consumption, that's consumed with the fabrication of American popular culture, that's consumed with the absence of painting as a dominant language within popular culture.

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And what I'm trying to do is go to places like Dakar, in Senegal...places like Lagos, in Nigeria.

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Increasingly, I'm looking at models within that demographic and asking them to choose their favorite moments, art historically, to have them monumentalized in paintings.

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That show opens this summer, at the Studio Museum in Harlem.