Kehinde Wiley

This right here is Kehinde Wiley and he’s dope as hell. The brotha’s only forty, but he became a part of Black History as the first black and openly gay person commissioned to paint an official Presidential Portrait for Barack Obama.

Kehinde was born in Los Angeles, California in 1977. His dad was from Nigeria, and his mother was born here in the states.

Kehinde was all bout that art from a young ass age! She hooked him up with all types of art supplies, and even put him in a bunch of after school arts programs.

While all his other lil friends were playing around, scraping their lil knees, lil Kehinde was inside drawing, already working on his craft. At twelve years old, it was clear that art was his passion, so his mother sent him to study at an art school in Russia.

He earned an BFA from the San Fransisco Art Institute before struttin’ into Yale to snag his MFA.

So Kehinde’s aesthetic is SUPER DOPE. Brotha be remixing old and new like it’s going out of style! (It’s not!) He’ll take an established classic, like that dusty ass Napoleon painting, and add a heroic looking black man, and a Wes Anderson looking backdrop and BOOM, new hood classic!

His eye for the black form is uncanny, often basing his portraits on pictures he’s taken while out and about. About his work Kehinde has said: “Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it’s an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time. The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There’s a dissonance between inside and outside.”

His art has often been described as homoerotic, there are sperm motifs throughout his work used as symbols representing masculinity and gender. In an article posted on the website: “The Grio” George M. Johnson wrote: “Wiley’s queer identity shapes the lens through which he sees the world and it’s important to his story—as much as his Blackness. The omission of that tells only part of the story, a revisionist history Black queer people are only now unpacking, with many of our legends getting their due honor inclusive of identity long after death.”

In October 2017 Wiley was chosen by President Barack Obama as the artist who would paint the official portrait of the former President. The painting was unveiled on February 12 2018 and it broke the damn internet. Here, Obama sits in power! Behind him, a field of greenery from which flowers representing his family and his past bloom around him. The shit is STUNNING!

That next month Kehinde’s exhibit: In Search of the Miraculous, opened in the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, where it remained until Jan 27 2018.

This brotha is ill, and I could spend hours looking at his artwork, and let’s be real, I probably will. The importance of this man sharing his art, and rising to the very pinnacle of both his industry and beyond are inspiring and thats why today February 20th I’m remembering and celebrating Kehinde Wiley.