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Transcription: [00:05:16]
{SPEAKER name="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?

[00:05:28]
{SPEAKER name="Kehinde Wiley "}

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

[00:05:33]

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.

[00:05:42]

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.

[00:06:00]

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

[00:06:08]

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.

[00:06:17]

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

[00:06:23]

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.

[00:06:36]

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.

[00:06:50]
{SPEAKER name="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?

[00:07:03]
And does this in any way relate to your experience with the Columbus Project in the Columbus Museum of Art, or not?

[00:07:10]
I'm particularly interested in what you think about your work in the context of the Portrait Gallery.

[00:07:16]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:07:32]
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.

[00:07:47]
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.

[00:08:02]
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.

[00:08:14]
But in the act of doing that sort of editing, does that not leave out certain points of view?

[00:08:19]
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.

[00:08:33]
By and large, the center has the power that the center has always had.

[00:08:39]
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.

[00:08:49]
{SPEAKER name="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?

[00:09:08]
Could you share that with us?

[00:09:09]
{SPEAKER name="Kehinde Wiley "}
Sure. Sure.

[00:09:10]
This coming fall, and this summer actually, I'll be launching the first of my West Africa Paintings.

[00:09:19]
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.

[00:09:30]
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.

[00:09:44]
And what I'm trying to do is go to places like Dakar, in Senegal...places like Lagos, in Nigeria.

[00:09:51]
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.

[00:10:02]
That show opens this summer, at the Studio Museum in Harlem.