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Transcription: [00:03:01]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:03:17]
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.

[00:03:30]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:03:44]
They also have their roots in traditional western portraiture, but the details are particular to each subject. Could you talk about those?

[00:03:53]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:04:02]
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.

[00:04:11]
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.

[00:04:22]
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.

[00:04:40]
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.

[00:04:59]
In my paintings, perhaps we don't take these things so seriously.

[00:05:03]
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.