Kehinde Wiley
The Master Portrait Painter
Portrait of artist Kehinde Wiley adapted from a photo courtesy of Frazer Harrison/Getty.
Kehinde Wiley is a portrait painter whose photo-realistic canvases often depict black and brown people posing heroically against floral backdrops. Wiley has routinely restaged the classical portraits and sculptures of Old Masters, substituting contemporary inner-city residents in modern urban clothing in place of traditional white Europeans. Wiley references various styles and artists, such as Venetian painters Titian and Giambattista Tiepolo, Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, French Rococo painting, African textile design, and Islamic architecture.
Presidential portrait of Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley.
An announcement in October 2017 revealed that Barack Obama chose Wiley to paint his official presidential portrait. Michelle Obama chose another black artist, Amy Sherald, to paint the First Lady portrait. The paintings were unveiled on February 12, 2018, marking the first time in the 56 years of its existence that the National Portrait Gallery commissioned two works by black American artists.
Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California, on February 28, 1977, along with a twin brother, Taiwo. His father, Isaiah D. Obot, is Nigerian, of the Yoruba people. Wiley grew up without Obot, who came to the U.S. to study on a scholarship before returning to Africa, leaving behind Wiley, his mother, and his five siblings. Later in life, Wiley traveled to Nigeria to meet him. His mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, is a black American. She raised six children alone in South Central Los Angeles, including Wiley and his brother, whose artistic talent she fostered by enrolling them in after-school art classes at age 11. Regarding this period, Wiley told journalist Killian Fox of the Guardian:
“She wanted us to stay away from gang culture; the sense that most of my peers would end up either dead or in prison was a very real thing. So we were on buses doing five-hour round trips every weekend to go study art.”
While Wiley’s twin, Taiwo, developed an interest in medicine, literature, and business—he worked in real estate and finance as an adult—Wiley admits to catching the art bug. Growing up, Wiley’s family subsisted on welfare checks and meager earnings derived from a thrift shop his mother ran from the front lawn of their West Jefferson Avenue house. Despite their financial lack, Freddie Mae managed to prioritize the art education of her twin sons. In 1989, when they were 12, she sent the boys abroad to live in Russia through the Center for US-USSR Citizen Initiatives program to study art and learn Russian.
Wiley continued his studies at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. While there, he visited many of the city’s art galleries to admire paintings from landscape artist John Constable, portraitists Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, among others. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999, he attended Yale School of Art on a scholarship, completing his Master of Fine Arts in 2001. Shortly after, Wiley did a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, earning around $500 a month. He painted during the day and slept outside on the museum grounds at night. Wiley credits that experience with making him the artist he is today.
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