If it Ain't Baroque, Don't Fix it
When we caught this brotha on Today being interviewed by the walking hairstyle known as Matt Lauer, we were afraid he might be reaching the point of overexposure. Still and all, 28-year-old, New York-based painter Kehinde Wiley has just opened a major solo exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art featuring a raft of new paintings along with other installed items designed to shed light on the artist's working methods. The show is scheduled to run through 7 January 2007.
We're used to the painter's conceit of recasting seminal Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo portraits with young, black men (almost always men) dressed in common everyday street wear and surrounded by the most florid of abstract filigree and pattern. The current exhibition, however, will be the first in which all the works the artist reinterprets are from a single collection--in this case, the museum's own. Kehinde set up shop in Columbus in 2005, selecting works from the museum's permanent collection and then selecting local men from the Columbus area to serve as subjects in his recreations of those works. The result is a cycle of six paintings that reconsider masculinity, race, and class through the lens of western art history.
The exhibition is filled out with a video of the artist's process installed in a re-creation of an "opulent baroque salon."
We note how hype tends to follow hype, as this project is fast on the heels of Kehinde's commissioned portraits of VH1's Hip-Hop Honors recipients, and that the current exhibition is being accompanied by not just a catalog, but by a 40-page hardcover book published in conjunction with LA gallery Roberts & Tilton. Ah, yes, we see Kehinde's PR machine is running overtime and wouldn't be surprised to see him turn up next on Oprah's big, white, softly-lit couch.
23 October 2006