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Kehinde Wiley
Ice T
2005
Oil on Canvas
6 x 8 feet |
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Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
(1780-1867)
Portrait of Napoleon on the Imperial Throne
1806. Oil on canvas. 259 × 162 cm
The Army Museum, Paris |
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Kehinde Wiley: I was born during the late 1970's, in Los Angeles, California, within a predominately African-American and Mexican community. The school I attended wasn't primarily focused on art. However, early on, when I was around eleven years old, I began taking art classes on the weekends at a small conservatory that was hosted on a college campus. There I was able to interact with students from various age groups. Much of the program was very traditional: painting, sculpting, and drawing from life. They thought not so much about the conventional aspects of painting and drawing, but rather the nuts and bolts and material concerns; for instance, how do you craft an image?
Art Interview: Which university were these courses offered at?
Kehinde Wiley: Cal State University in Los Angeles was the university that hosted the conservatory, although the conservatory itself had no official affiliation with the university as such, it was simply housed there.
Art Interview: You're from a rather large family. Are any of your siblings also interested in the arts?
Kehinde Wiley: No, but it's interesting you ask. When I was attending this school on weekends my twin brother went to class with me. I suppose, contrary to the popular perception of twins, we didn't both stick to it equally.
Art Interview: Did your parents encourage you to become an artist?
Kehinde Wiley: Yes, I think I benefited substantially from my mothers initial encouragement in the arts. She would often go out and buy art supplies for me and collect different materials from rummage sales and yard sales. The things that she would bring back I would experiment with. I remember getting my first watercolor set from an estate sale in Los Angeles that my mother brought home one day.
Art Interview: Was your mother a single parent?
Kehinde Wiley: Yes, my mother was the sole support for her six kids. My parents separated shortly before I was born, and my father returned to Nigeria, the country of his birth. I had never met my father until I was 20 years old. That year I decided to fly to Nigeria to find him, and sort of discover who this man was that I had never seen in my entire life.
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Kehinde Wiley
The Officer of the Hussars
2008
Oil on Canvas
9 x 9 feet |
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Théodore Géricault
(1791 - 1824)
The Officer of the Hussars
1812
Oil on Canvas
61 x 71 cm
Musee du Louvre, Paris |
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Art Interview: Did that trip have any effect on your art?
Kehinde Wiley: In a way it did. I had no idea what my father looked like for a very long time, because my mother had destroyed all the photographs of him. So I had a visceral desire to connect with the physical aspects of who he is and what he looked like. After meeting him, I started a series of paintings that were based on his portrait. I suspect in some ways that has affected the trajectory of my interest in portraiture.
Art Interview: What did your mother do for a living?
Kehinde Wiley: My mother was a student when I was young. She received her masters degree in African Linguistics at the University of Southern California. After graduating, she lost interest in academics and opened an antique store. I grew up surrounded by old chests and clothes; it was a magical environment of constant change that was rooted in the past and its resonance still affects my esthetic decisions today.
Art Interview: Was your mother surprised when you became successful as an artist?
Kehinde Wiley: She says she isn't. (laughs) That's pretty much indicative of her attitude and her encouragement towards me from the beginning.
Art Interview: After your artistic interest was sparked as a child, what made you choose to pursue a degree in art?
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Kehinde Wiley
Encourage good manners and politeness: brighten up your surrondings with plants
2007
Oil and enamel on Canvas
5 x 5 feet |
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Kehinde Wiley: When I was in high school many of the people I surrounded myself with wanted to become artists and the problems of how we would support ourselves, continue the practice of art making and enrich it as well was constantly on our minds. Increasingly we turned to the universities to continue our passion to create. We knew we would be in a better position to become professors or teachers if we had our masters degrees in fine art and that this could subsidize our art habits. I was very excited after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute to be invited to attend Yale University because of its academic offerings, and possibility of that further cross-fertilizing some of ideas that I had been evolving in my practice.
Art Interview: Had you applied to Yale under a stipendium, or was there another way that you approached the university?
Kehinde Wiley: I went through the usual channels: submitting applications, going through a series of interviews, flying to Connecticut and submitting the work for a final review. It took some time before I knew the status of my application.
Art Interview: Was it a concern financially for you, considering that Yale is such an expensive school?
Kehinde Wiley: It was, but at that point in life educational debt was rather abstract. I was already in debt from my undergraduate studies, so another round of loans for graduate school simply appeared to be something that was to be dealt with at a time when real world concerns were more in the forefront. At the moment of applying there it was done by any means necessary, so I started taking school loans. However, I was offered quite a bit of financial support by the school itself.
Art Interview: Was the assistance based on your portfolio, or your income?
Kehinde Wiley: Those things are based on merit as well as income. I certainly didn't have substantial income to report, nor did my mother, so that was easy to figure.
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Kehinde Wiley
Conspicuous Fraud
2001
Oil on Canvas
60 x 48 inches |
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Art Interview: While attending Yale were there any particular professors who supported your work or influenced you in ways you can see in your art today?
Kehinde Wiley: What's most important to realize about those years is not the esthetic affinity between the work I do and the professors I had, but rather some questions being asked; for example, the conceptual questions being posed to the student body. Those things change depending on what the chemical and bacteriological balance is in the petri dish that is the Yale painting program. People like Mel Bochner and Peter Halley functioned as the lions of the department, and their points of view functioned primarily out of a post-conceptualist engagement with how the language of art could interact and interface with the changing world; and with a post-conceptual global inclusive tensibility. How is it we can make art that matters, not only to people who read “October Magazine”, but perhaps also to those reading “Vibe” and “Complex”?
Art Interview: How long did it take you to solidify your style?
Kehinde Wiley: It hasn't solidified; it's constantly changing. Every exhibition I've done yet has taken different thematic and organizational turns. The most recent work I'm doing is exploding the notion of a black American identity in my work, or a type of Afro-American normative gauge and pushing that out into something is quite a bit more confused and wandering. Currently I'm gathering models from Senegal and Nigeria, and I just got back from India. I was painting in China and Turkey, and in the next two months I'll be off to Brazil to do more casting for modeling. I'm looking for a type of trace element, some sort of recognition from one location to the next, charting in some senses the ways in which young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are very specific and mark a demographic that is increasingly being used for marketing and promotional purposes globally. This can be tied to a narrative around style, but also around culture and history. The ”World Stage” project I'm embarking on is about a type of American blackness that has beamed out from the borders of America to places like Lagos, Nigeria or Dakar, Senegal, and you see echoes of this American hip-hop culture, but you also see very pre-colonial echoes of West Africa. This type of intersection can produce more questions in the work, and also announce a type of mystery that doesn't quite have a fixed narrative or a stylistic pattern.
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Kehinde Wiley
Great celebration of the victorius people
2007
Oil on Canvas
8 x 6 feet |
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Art Interview: Is the “World Stage” project something you're attempting in order to reach out beyond borders of the American esthetic, or is it the opposite?
Kehinde Wiley: I don't know exactly what the American esthetic is. I think increasingly we are finding it harder to name things in that way. As we become interdependent you can see these things in other disciplines. I'm a great admirer of food and if you think about what American cuisine is, and how we've collided with each other, evolved and convulsed, somehow arriving at American cuisine that's constantly in flux, because as different population groups interact and arrive at different taste patterns, fashions, stabilities and consumptions, those things drive what the American esthetic can be. My work is more concerned, not necessarily with what America is, but what America feels like, and increasingly what America feels like starts outside of America.
Art Interview: Do you believe that the American image has changed in the past 10 years?
Kehinde Wiley: For example, if I concentrate on the spectrum of black American performance... Ten years ago, in 1997, I went to Nigeria, to find my father. I met young musicians who knew their work would not be appreciated in Nigeria, but they were embraced by the left, and they were somehow heroes there. The Nigerian audience would later appreciate them but at that point Nigerian hip-hop was just not on the scene. Of course, that has changed completely now. There's this entire underground scene of emerging Nigerian hip-hop and Nigerian film-making; a whole creation of an industry called Nollywood which is 2nd to India in terms of film production annually. This is part of a tendency and a realization in a lot of post-colonial states, to resist the desire to look to the West for approval of their cultural product, and to embrace their own authenticity as a starting point. All of those collisions aren't necessarily clean as you might be tempted to embrace. Often when going from one post-colonial power to another you find that the realities on the streets are just as varied as the populations themselves.
Art Interview: Can you tell me how you began to concentrate on portraiture and, specifically, the subject matter that you've chosen.
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Kehinde Wiley
Passing/posing #14
2002
Oil on Canvas
32 x 32 inches |
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Kehinde Wiley: After graduating from Yale, I was invited to be an artist and resident at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is a program that encourages young artists of African decent, to set up shop in the museum, and have a studio on the premises.
Art Interview: What was the process of getting this residency?
Kehinde Wiley: You apply for the program, submitting images of your work, and statements, letters of recommendation; the usual requirements to get into most programs.
Art Interview: How long was the residency?
Kehinde Wiley: It was one year, and it was the only paid residency in the city at the time. It offered me an immense amount of freedom - I didn't have to worry about how to make a living or where I was going to paint. For that first crucial year outside of graduate school, I had a place to work, and was able to concentrate on what I wanted to do with my work. My interest had always been around figurative painting and portraiture; that was my passion. Daily I was going to my studio and interacting with a very vibrant New York, a very different type of black community than the one I grew up with in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a non-pedestrian locale, where most social interaction in the streets or public space was interrupted by the need to drive. In Harlem there was an immense visual spectacle of young black women and men and the old alike, cascading through 125th street almost as if it were the next fashion runway. I remember seeing a music video that had just hit TV and how fashion changes would occur within days. Then the new fashions would soon decay and evolve into something else.
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Kehinde Wiley
Passing/posing Immaculate Consumption 2
2003
Oil on Canvas
33.5 x 35 inches |
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Not only was it interesting to look at that as a cultural phenomenon, but also at the way in which portraiture itself is a cultural phenomenon. It was fertile ground to begin asking myself fundamental questions, about culture, class, society, the spectacle and the commodification of not only black American culture but also black American masculinity. The first set of paintings I did in Harlem came as a result of working with people I pulled off the street and asked to model for me in a simple sittings. They were cropped from the shoulders to the head, and were simple studies painted from life. We would sit in the studio and discuss painting and art history; eventually the process of having the models choose poses out of my art history books evolved into a natural progression from conversation to practice. As one move would occur I would sit back and look at the paintings, then question, “What's possible next?” Most people are familiar with the narrative of how my models are invited into the studio to assume poses, which they are allowed to select from art history books. As that process evolved I began to question the idea of this authentic moment that people were assuming existed in those paintings, and it's gone so far as to allow me to push the boundaries of that and invite professional stylists to come in and play with the idea of the authentic. Now there is this narrative around my work, is this one of the real people who I found on the streets, or is this a moment carefully crafted from a focus group, and I'm never going to tell you which painting is which. There will always be questions concerning which one is the real and which is the sort of authentic copy. What's happened here is the creation of a type of mythology surrounding not only my work, but what it means to be in these paintings, and what it looks like to be a young black man in America today.
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Kehinde Wiley
Portrait of Pablillos de Valladolid Button de Phillip V
2005
Oil on Canvas
5 x 6 feet |
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Diego Velázquez
(1599-1660)
Pablo de Valladolid
1633
Oil on Linen
209 x 123 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
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Art Interview: How do you approach the class system and conflicts of class system? You're painting generally urban men, and you began with lower class people from the streets. That has since changed. Is class an issue in your work?
Kehinde Wiley: It's interesting you ask, because when you describe the models in my paintings as urban men, you're correct; New York City is one of the most dynamic urban areas globally, however New York City is also the home of more millionaires per capita than any other site. The question concerning the economic reality that models are facing is one that I never really know. I don't know if they're poor young black people or rich young curious art connoisseurs. It's merely a matter of esthetic choice that drives me to choose one person over the next. There is a very real economic disparity between the races in America that can't be ignored as a subtext, a very non-subtle subtext in my work and the history of painting and certainly the history of portraiture; it's been the story of very powerful wealthy white men deciding to portray themselves in certain ways that quite frankly is a type of propaganda, a positioning oneself in the world to engender a point of view. I'm trying to take that language and criticize it, hammering it down to some sort of corrective object. My goal is to resurrect it in the form of something that seems a bit more delightful and playful, and something not didactic or preachy, but rather quite engaging, a language that I fell in love with as a young kid who really loved painting. I want to find some way in which I can recognize truth and myself in it and the things that resonate within me and resonate within the culture. I'm attempting to engage a question, not necessarily around the history of portraiture or religious iconography and propaganda surrounding wealthy white men, or the class disparities between the richand the poor in America, or the race disparity, but rather a type of celebration, not necessarily of the darker sides of these chaotic and sometimes discouraging actualities, but the magic that can occur when all of these different possibilities interact in some way. The work doesn't always find a redemptive landing point, but many times it does. The work differs substantially from a lot of political work we see from artists of color coming out of the late 50's and 60's. I stand on the shoulders of many very brave and talented African American and Latino artists who were all artists of good will regardless of gender or race, who decided to ask more pointed political questions. It's more radical and exciting for me to use the absence of a political starting point as the starting point, and this is a type of political narrative. The questions concerning class, gender, race, sexuality, are terribly interesting and potent, but at the same time, they tend to slow down the process of reading the paintings. When you arrive at any great painting, the hope is that you are engaged and fixated upon what the painting is doing rather than what the world is doing outside of the picture, but the painting also serves as a catalyst for further reflection. Those are two interdependent states of viewing.
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Kehinde Wiley
After La Négresse, 1872
2006-2007
Cast marble dust and resin
11 x 10 x 9 inches |
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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
(1827-1875)
La Négresse
1872
Cast terracotta
61 cm in height
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Art Interview: When you approach a painting, how much of the process is intellectual for you and how much of it is gut instinct; simply letting your hand work?
Kehinde Wiley: As an artist there's a craft involved with the daily practice of painting and a way of thinking about the world. So much has to do with what objects I've made that came before the paintings, or the blank canvas that sits in front of me. Every decision is driven by a conceptual pc, but certainly the materials drive other possibilities. More recently I've moved beyond 2-dimensional picture making and explored the realm of sculpture and photography. Those material processes draw different questions around what they mean in the world, how they're made and what I can say that hasn't been said before within those idioms. There is a very real material responsibility that drives not only the way the work comes out, but what the work says and how the work is perceived.
Art Interview: On average, how many hours do you work a day?
Kehinde Wiley: It varies. I generally get into the studio in the mornings, and leave in the evenings in a very mundane way, much like a regular job.
Art Interview: The scale of your work is relatively large. What are the average sizes of your paintings currently?
Kehinde Wiley: I tend to work on a slightly larger than life scale. My goal is to make paintings that have a physical weight in the world and to contend with human scale. Generally these paintings are 8 to 12 feet in height.
Art Interview: How long does it take to paint something that large?
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Kehinde Wiley
Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignano
2006
Oil on Canvas
7 x 8 feet |
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Sir Anthony Van Dyck
(1599-1641)
Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignano
1634
Oil On Canvas
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Kehinde Wiley: It depends on the styles and sweep of the painting, and level of complexity in the work. I've got paintings that have been sitting in my studio for three years, and I've got paintings that I complete in three months. Some paintings have more involved and intricate decorative components that require teams and assistants to be realized, where as other paintings are quiet and contemplative and it's just me painting, very simply with watercolors or drawing. It's painting in the 21st century, and I think that the material aspect of painting is something that not only drives the timing of how long it takes, but also what that object is going to look like. Sometimes I paint with a digital photograph, which then goes through Photoshop, which then is mechanically projected onto the canvas whereupon a team of assistants helped me realize intricate decorative components and then finally I'm at that quiet moment where the portraiture can be concentrated on. It's no different than a Titian or Ruben sort of orchestrated painting opera, but I think it's also filtered through some of the more dazzling technological realities that you can take advantage of as an artist today.
Art Interview: Have you chosen techniques that help speed your productivity over the period of a year in order to meet the demand for your work?
Kehinde Wiley: My work is driven by an idea, more than a marketplace, or how many people want paintings. If I have a great idea that's going to take a very long time to actualize I don't hesitate to do it, because I think what makes for a great work of art is a constant vigilance on that work, rather than the people who consume that work. In that sense I'm doing the viewership a favor, by ignoring it.
Art Interview: On average, how many paintings do you produce in a year?
Kehinde Wiley: I've never really counted, but I would imagine I produce maybe two paintings every month and a half. I've got so many unfinished paintings lying around, there's no real way of calculating. I come in and decide what it is I'm interested in working on and what excites me today. As time goes on things come to fruition or completion and the other things that are less successful get sidelined.
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Kehinde Wiley
The Dead Christ in the Tomb
2008
Oil on Canvas
3 x 12 feet |
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Hans Holbein the Younger
(1497 - 1543)
The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb
1521
Oil on wood
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland |
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Art Interview: What materials do you use to produce your work?
Kehinde Wiley: Oil on canvas.
Art Interview: Is it all hand applied by yourself, or do your assistants help?
Kehinde Wiley: My team and I do it. Right now I have three assistants.
Art Interview: How do you approach the process of going from model to canvas?
Kehinde Wiley: The poses for the current works I'm doing come from existing sculptures in public spaces in cities in West Africa. There is no real need for preparatory drawings. What I've done is to fly to Dakar and to Lagos photographing in a 360 manner all sculptures of interest to me; then I find a studio to photograph models in and have the models assume those poses. At that point the work is digitized and the colors are manipulated to my liking, some colors are taken out; some colors are invented. Some aspects of the models' appearance have been changed, or amplified. Increasingly, this type of heightened intervention takes place.
Art Interview: How do you approach putting the photographic image on the canvas?
Kehinde Wiley: The photographs are downloaded onto a disk and we digitally project them onto canvas. The images are then drawn onto the canvas and a sepia underpainting is applied. After the sepia underpainting, the final portraiture is done.
Art Interview: Do you work with glazes on top of the sepia?
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Kehinde Wiley
Portrait of Andries
2006
Oil on canvs
6 x 8 feet |
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Kehinde Wiley: There are a total of three different layers of painting that take place. There's the underpainting, then a type of structural blending, and then the final sweep of glazing and heightening with color and shade.
Art Interview: Is there a particular brand of oil paint or brush you prefer?
Kehinde Wiley: I'm not partial to any particular brand of brushes. I tend to paint with ‘Old Holland' because of its potency of color.
Art Interview: When you finish the work, do you varnish it?
Kehinde Wiley: I don't use varnish proper, but there is a type of glaze that I've been using for a few years now.
Art Interview: Let's talk a bit about how you began your career. Directly after your residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, several galleries picked you up. Did they approach you, or did you apply to them?
This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Kehinde Wiley on September 5, 2007. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine. The biography introducing Kehinde Wiley at the beginning of this interview was written by Steve Schepens and Ekaterina Rietz-Rakul for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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