800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, California, United States
Wiley earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999.
1156 Chapel St, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Wiley received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale School of Art in 2001.
2015
Kehinde Wiley at his Brooklyn studio with his oil "Judith Beheading Holofernes", 2012.
Kehinde Wiley and Barack Obama.
Kehinde Wiley stands in front of his "Unity" portrait, commissioned for the 2010 World Cup.
2015
Kehinde Wiley at his Brooklyn studio with his oil "Judith Beheading Holofernes", 2012.
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, California, United States
Wiley earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999.
1156 Chapel St, New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Wiley received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale School of Art in 2001.
Kehinde Wiley and Barack Obama.
Kehinde Wiley stands in front of his "Unity" portrait, commissioned for the 2010 World Cup.
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Ethnicity:
His father is Yoruba from Nigeria, and his mother is African American.
Wiley was born on February 28, 1977 in Los Angeles, California, United States; the son of Freddie Mae Wiley and Isaiah D. Obot.
Wiley took art classes at a conservatory at California State University in 1988. A year later he attended a six-week art program outside Leningrad (nowadays St. Petersburg) sponsored by the Center for U.S./U.S.S.R. Initiatives.
Kehinde earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999. Two years later he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale School of Art.
Wiley has participated in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe since 2001. While in residence in 2001 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he found a discarded New York City Police Department mug shot of a black man, and it inspired his early series "Conspicuous Fraud" and the video "Smile". Then Kehinde made the Passing/Posing series in 2001-2004, in which he replaced the heroes, prophets, and saints of Old Master paintings with young black men who were dressed in trademarked hip-hop attire.
Wiley's "Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps", 2005 is based on "Napoleon Crossing the Alps", 1800 by Jacques-Louis David. In the series "Rumors of War", 2005, he displaced heroic equestrians, painted by such court painters as Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens, with contemporary men in team jerseys and Timberland boots, but he kept the original portraits' titles.
In addition, Kehinde has painted men from Harlem's 125th Street, as well as the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was born. In 2006, Wiley opened a studio in Beijing, in 2006 to use several helpers to do brushstrokes for his paintings. Then in 2012, he exhibited work in Beijing including multiple paintings of women. In 2015, he collaborated with the Brooklyn Museum of Art to organize the exhibition "Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic", which charted the course of his 14-year career.
In 2016, Kehinde had a retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum. Also in May 2017, he had an exhibition "Trickster" at the Sean Kelly Gallery, which included 11 paintings depicting contemporary black artists. The same year, Kehinde was commissioned to paint a portrait of President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. That painting was unveiled in 2018.
Wiley currently lives and works between New York, Beijing and Dakar.
Wiley's works are in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Hammer Museum, Harn Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nasher Museum of Art and many others.
In 2002, he was given a grant from Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Also in 2012, Kehinde received the Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award for Artistic Achievement.
Leviathan Zodiac
2011Jefferson
2009Treisha Lowe
2012Portrait of John and George Soane
2013President Barack Obama
2018Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps
2005Alios Itzhak
2011Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson)
2009Benin Mother and Child
2008Rubin Singleton
2008Regard the Class Struggle as the Main Link in the Chain
2007Threefold Defence
2007Head of a Young Girl Veiled Study
2010Anthony of Padua
2013Clevins Browne
2013Soly Cisse
2008The Sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte
2014Portrait of Kea Loha Mahuta II
2019Portrait of Wangechi Mutu
2017The Call
2019Portrait of Kea Teuru
2019Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted
2016Portrait of Mary Hill, Lady Killgrew
2013Portrait of Moerai Matuanui
2019Wiley's subjects are often young black men and women, rendered in a Photo-Realist style against densely patterned backgrounds.
Wiley has kept his personal life private but acknowledges that he identifies as a gay man.
