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.
Comments
Just got in from NYC. Spent a couple of hours at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where Wiley's 9 x 9 feet work Napoleon leading the army over the Alps hangs large in the entrance and refuses to be ignored. Cinque, I'm curious...is it Wiley, his work or the marketing of his work that you take issue with?
Huh? Did I miss something? I'm not taking issue with anything. I am taking note of an important phenomenon in the art world, however, that I believe readers should know about--in this case, Wiley's conscious blending of high and low forms, which also manifests itself in certain kinds of marketing/PR, all of which I believe the artist has been pretty up-front about.
Okay. Understood.
Did I miss something? What are you guys talking about? Is there controversey with Wiley's work? I wanna know, because that piece at the BK Museum makes my skin crawl, but his other work I like...
My impression of what we're talking about here really is the place of commerce and marketing in relationship to art making. I think Kehinde has come under fire for this--for being "too popular" in a sense. And in this article I think we unwittingly referenced that discussion, even though it was not meant to really be a focus.
He is not popular. He is an artist with great pr. He needs it. Artist never really become popular
Fine Artists need PR. Why not be marketed just like artists such as Beyonce and Jigga. I wonder when these campaigns for openings at Museums and galleries will get on TV and there will be big commercials and stuff. I think the problem some people have with the marketing of Fine Artists has to do with the idea that many people still have which says that art is for the elite. For me this is problematic for artists of color because it creates a situation where the concerns and subjects of the artist are never seen by the people within their imagery or those whom they would like to speak to. So there is a disconnect between many of the fine artists and their communities and you find some of these artists drifting off into their own little world talking about some really irrelevent out-of-touch stuff. Most black people could not tell you who the big black artists are today if they don't rap or sing. Hopefully all the hype can reach the masses to make create more of a dialogue. I want Kehinde to be on Hot 97 and for folks to call in and talk about how they feel about his imagery. These are the people who need to be reached and the sort of dialogue that needs to be had because these are the folks he's talking about. Without a sort of open dialogue it as though the conversation is being has behind their backs.