Kehinde Wiley: the painter who is doing for hip-hop culture what artists once did for the aristocracy

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Kehinde Wiley was 11 years old when his mother enrolled him in free art classes at a local university. From that point on, Wiley continued to study and practice art, going on to receive his M.F.A. from Yale. Hip-hop and art history collide on Wiley's canvases, in which contemporary urban black men pose as angels, prophets, and saints against richly colored swirls of ornate baroque and rococo ornamentation. It's art that is both brainy and ballsy, earning nods of approval from fans of Tupac and Tiepolo alike, which explains why his work has landed in the collections of both Russell Simmons and the Brooklyn Museum. Here the 28-year-old artist speaks to Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where as an artist-in-residence Wiley found inspiration for the works that have launched him into the art-world stratosphere.

THELMA GOLDEN: How are you, Kehinde?

KEHINDE WILEY: I'm fantastic.

TG: So, when did you know you were an artist? Did it happen right out of the womb? When did you first feel that you'd really made a work of art?

KW: It's tough to say. I feel like the process of becoming an artist in my own right took place sequentially. There was a point in high school that exemplified the beginnings of that when I was doing competitions with the NAACP's ACTSO program. I won bronze the first year. The second year I won silver, and then I finally finished off with gold.

TG: That makes you a real, official black artist. You have a gold medal in it! [both laugh]

KW: I suppose that's one way of looking at it.

TG: You studied at Yale and then came immediately to New York. Tell me how that transition from student to full-blown artist felt.

KW: Well, as you know, I was the artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was really my saving grace, coming as I did out of the very sheltered community at Yale. The Studio Museum provided the perfect environment for me to delve into my work without the concerns of professors or academic expectations. There was a big weight lifted--I was free to create without having to think about a day job or a gig. That allowed me to really throw myself into that studio and take risks that I wouldn't necessarily take. I had no idea that the Studio Museum program was as prestigious as it is. I just assumed that I'd be doing a residency, and that it'd be a great chance to do more work. But when the exhibition occurred at the end of the year, and all that attention started to come through, that's really what I think launched the beginnings of the career I'm starting to enjoy now.

TG: Tell me how the work began to define itself around what you're best known for: these incredible figurative portraits. There's an amazing attention to pattern and detail in your work.

KW: My interest in the figures goes back to the old 18th- and 19th-century portraits I was looking at as a child in museums in California. But when I came to live and work in Harlem, I was interested in doing a type of portraiture that engaged what I was seeing every day around me, which was a type of black community that was radically different from South Central Los Angeles, where I was born. And what defined that difference had to do with people in public space. Los Angeles by and large is about people driving around in cars. New York is more pedestrian, and there was a vibrancy there that I found really interesting. The idea of walking down 125th Street has this runway element to it; there's a sort of pomp that surrounds it. So initially I would just approach complete strangers and ask if I could paint their portrait.

TG: And what did people say?

KW: I got a lot of no's.

TG: I can imagine, and I'm sure it wasn't just a simple no. [both laugh]

KW: Yeah. Well, the tough part is breaking through that barrier that people put up. It helps to have a group of people with me to give me a sense of validity, vouching for me. It helps to have beautiful women there with me, too. It's this sort of flirtation that goes into the work. It's a way of reading the work. How did this chance moment go into being this heroicized monument? So what was then just an attempt to paint a portrait of a casual stranger began a conversation with those people who were being selected. We would be in the Studio Museum, going through my books, and we'd talk about art history. Eventually I found it interesting to make paintings that they were interested in, and to go so far as to allow them to choose the subject matter.

TG: There's an incredible amount of intimacy and familiarity in your work. Who are your subjects?

KW: I look for people who possess a certain type of power in the streets. You always look for that alpha male or alpha female character. But in the end it's about chemistry, and there's this agreement that gets entered into: How do you want to be shown? How do you want to appear to the world in perpetuity? Then that introduces questions concerning style of dress. People come in with their best on, but it's all a type of absolute fakery, this sort of constant construction upon construction. The whole thing is one big fabricated moment, but I guess that's the nature of painting itself. [a dog barks in the background]