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{SPEAKER name="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