Last winter, this blog featured a story about a painting exhibition by Kehinde Wiley at the St. Louis Art Museum. I’m excited to share that the museum has purchased one of the exhibit paintings, Charles I, for its permanent collection. And in additional news, Wiley has also contributed to the touring special exhibit, 30 Americans, which is at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, this summer (2019). Wiley’s 2008 painting, Sleep, can be seen in the 30 Americans, which features the works of thirty African-American artists and has been on the road for a decade.  The selection of specific items exhibited in each show is tailored for the venue. 

While each piece of visual art tells its own story, Wiley’s body of work is particularly arresting (at least to an art history nerd, such as me). Utilizing the forms and conventions of the Western European artistic tradition, Wiley creates portraits of contemporary people of color. Each portrait subject is posed to mimic an iconic, classical painting. The canvases are huge, the style is realistic, and the effect is amazing. 

Wiley’s paintings commence a new story—a different narrative—nuanced, human, and deep. They invite us to peer under the glittering artifice of traditional court paintings and see the arbitrary nature of social class and ethnic divisions.

In Wiley’s Charles I, a seventeenth-century king of England is displaced by a young black woman from twenty-first century Ferguson, Missouri. The painting engages the viewer in its story: Are these figures the exact opposite of each other? Or do they have things in common? How does the woman comment on the king? And King Charles was ultimately executed—does he comment on the peril of young people, people of color, and women in twenty-first century America?

Does visual art ever tell you a story? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section. 

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