Just last week, I finally made it to the St. Louis Art Museum to see Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of St. Louis citizens. His name sounded familiar, since this artist produced Barack Obama’s amazing official portrait, displayed at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. https://npg.si.edu/exhibition/former-president-barack-obama-artist-kehinde-wiley
The paintings displayed in St. Louis are in the style of portraits that fill museums: Larger-than-life-sized oils from Europe of the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Yet the figures in Wiley’s exhibit are not kings and queens or priests and merchants, but rather everyday people of color, sitting for their portraits against fields of bright, stylized wallpaper. The paintings as a group of objects are beautiful, but most interesting is the way the whole project shines light into the corners of history and perceptions.
The modern people of color chose an outfit for their sittings from their own wardrobes. Wiley posed his subjects to mimic a specific old European painting, with which the artist entitled the finished work. Each painting asks viewers to think about the stories we tell ourselves. How the preconceptions, the expectations, and who writes—or paints—history feedback into the preconceptions and expectations. This exhibit challenged me to shake up those expectations.